Originally a hacker was used to describe someone very knowledgeable with computers, while a cracker was someone who broke into networks and wreaked havoc. But the media took the term "hacker" and demonized it into a term used to describe someone who cracks into protected systems. Notice how that is termed. A hacker cracks into protected systems. A person who takes advantage of known vulnerabilities on unprotected systems is known as a script kiddy. Script kiddies often have little knowledge of what he is really doing, but they cause the greatest damage and greatest threat to most businesses. It is because of these script kiddies that you must keep your software up to date and spend so much on security.

So what can you do about script kiddies? The first thing to do is realize who these people are. These can be your employees, or they can be some mischievous teenager from the outside who you don't know and they might not even know who they are dealing with. The employee script kiddy is the most dangerous because he has access to the inside of your network. Very few companies bother locking down their internal network. That is something we will cover in next week's news article.

As far as external script kiddies they tend to scan large ranges of IPs to see if there is any open ports then take advantage of the known and documented vulnerabilities. They also try and trick users into divulging confidential information such as user names and password, or they send viruses thru email.

Call us at The Net Secure for a consultation.

What can be done about laptop theft?  It can be frustrating knowing you lost $1000 worth of equipment, but what about the invaluable data on it?

First of all you don't want to lose it, but even worse you don't want the thief to have that data.

In this scenario the only option is to be prepared.  Install a remote access program that doesn't rely on being at one point such as Team Viewer or GoToMyPC.  There is even applications that is specifically geared towards deleting all data when the laptop is stolen, but remote access programs allow us to have a bit more fun.

After the laptop is stolen try and login to your laptop, once you get into it I would recommend using the file viewer to recover the data you want and delete the rest immediately.  Don't use the remote desktop part to do this!!! That will alert them and stop access.  Team Viewer has a file transfer option, use that.

Once the data is secure, lets have a little fun.  Start up the remote desktop portion of your remote access program.  You can see whatever they are doing, and you can do stuff for them.  If you want to recover your laptop I would not recommend doing that though as they might discard the laptop.

If you want to recover your laptop then buy laptops that are lojack compatible.  A full list of compatible laptops are listed here.

This chart will help break down the main areas you need to cover, and in future posts we will discuss how to close the loop holes in all of these subjects.

The biggest advantage of having a virtual machine, is the lack of needing to reinstall the whole machine if hardware fails. It will take you less than 5 minutes to boot that virtual machine right back up. But if that server was running on its own server and the hardware failed you'd be in trouble. It could take hours to reinstall the OS on a new machine and then recover the data, and if you don't have a full time IT guy on staff, then it could cost you a lot of money too.

VMWare also allows you to let your hardware have a longer life span without fear of a catastrophe. Server dies? Big deal boot the virtual machine from another server. Don't have another server? Install VMWare on the nearest computer and boot it on that.

That whole scenario happened in less than 15 minutes for a slow poke IT guy. 15 minutes vs hours... Arguing doesn't seem to have much point here.

So why have a dedicated server at all?  In some scenarios you need some serious number crunching power, but in the SMB world the need of a dedicated server is few and far between.

For all you IT needs you can call The Net Secure whether your local or from across the world at (469)835-0259

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