Well, what can we do you ask? Well one thing is for sure - the people who run online systems that store sensitive data can take steps to secure the data and access to it. As we’ve seen from the events at HMRC - even governments can get this wrong. For our part we’ve carried out an extensive security review and are implementing the recommendations - I guess that sounds fluffy but it has to - if I told you then The Bad Guys™ would have a better chance of getting in, and we don’t want that. We’ll be making official statements on the issue in the coming year.
Now - what can you do as a user? The most obvious thing is to be careful who you hand out information to - as we’ve seen in the HMRC example even ‘trusted’ organisations can get it wrong. Barring becoming a hermit and eschewing all forms of technology…….anyway, what to do. Here are the basics, I’ll assume you are with the majority and run some variant of Microsoft OS;
Update your operating system regularly with the latest patches
Get a good security scanner - Virus, Trojan, Firewall etc
Use a good spam filter
Do not surf the web using an account with Admin rights
Most of these scams are based around tricking the user into clicking on something that lets The Bad Guys™ install stuff on your machine. Emails with links to software downloads are a marketing and distribution dream come true. For those of us at the other end it means that The Bad Guys™ can take advantage of this and send us very realistic looking emails asking us to click this or that to download the latest widget - which we duly do only to discover we’ve been tricked. Below you’ll find some links to sites with more information on how to protect yourself. If you have questions please post them in the comment section.
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