Zach's IT Security Tips

You Attract More Flies with Honey Ah the sweet sweet taste of honey! Who knew that something so sticky and messy could taste so sweet! For as long as I can remember, Winnie the Pooh has been chasing down honey his whole life. It seems like almost every episode of the show, Winnie the Pooh was on a constant chase for that sweet liquid gold (not to be confused with Velveeta). Winnie the pooh would do anything to get his hands on those honeypots. The same could be said for hackers today. They will stop at nothing to get their hands on something sweet and delicious. Whether that is personal information, business information, or even large amounts of money. One way we can protect ourselves from hackers is to trick them into thinking they are getting honey, when in fact they are not getting any honey at all. The honeypot concept is basically like reverse hacking, you deploy a decoy system on your network (typically in the DMZ) that will bait a hacker into thinking that they are on...

Who needs protection anyway? You wake up to a new day, grab some breakfast, and turn on the news. You hear another story about a huge company involved in a massive data breach! You think to yourself "Man that sucks! That is never going to happen to my small business." You show up later to your office and one if the IT techs is framing out, little do you know that your small business has been involved in a data breach! Customer information has been leaked out. Uh oh...this wasn't supposed to happen. Just because your a small business it doesn't mean you shouldn't worry about data breaches. No matter how big or small your operation is, having firewalls and network security in place is vital. All it takes is for someone to  visit the office and network sniff to gather information. If that information is encrypted and using secure protocols, then that network sniffer won't find a thing. Firewalls used to be somewhat of a pain to setup, but now with more u...

Risk = Growth Today's post is going to be slightly different. This week in our class, we are talking about risk management. When it comes to working in the IT field, there are tons of risks out there, especially when you are handling sensitive information. Although the IT field has ton of risk involved, I want to talk about another field where risk is probably more relevant, life itself. Throughout life, there are going to be a number of decisions we make where there is risk involved. Just view the journey of life as a project and you are the project manager. You are making decisions daily that effect the final outcome of your project. Some decisions are obvious and easy and others aren't so easy, but these not so easy decisions are the ones that give us the biggest learning opportunities! Each decision we make creates an outcome. When we experience these outcomes, this gives us a great opportunity to reflect and decide whether or not taking on that risk was worth goin...

Redundancy Is A Good Thing! Why have one when you can have two or three?! More always sounds better than one right? When it comes to IT Security, you can never have enough protection. At least that is my attitude towards the topic. For example, I know in the networking world, you never have just one switch, and one router, supporting hundreds of end users. You want to have multiple routers and switches that are redundant, so when one goes out, you have those others to pick up the slack and take care of the flow of traffic. The same concept can be said for IT Security. This week in my class we learned about defense-in-depth. The defense-in-depth strategy is the idea of having multiple layers of protection from the outskirts of the network to the end user. Each layer needs to have protection and redundant protection technologies. For example, I would not rely simply on one firewall on the edge of a network. Have multiple, lighten the work load, configure one firewall for a certain...