Friday, November 30, 2007

Room for Improvement

I dropped a laptop off a one of my clients office today. I went in to set up the Wireless card and get the email working properly. I popped the wireless card in and poof 2 unsecured networks popped up in the list. If that was not bad enough, both of these networks belonged to the company and both were named for that company. The good part of this is I now get to write up a nice proposal to try to get the company as a client. Business Wireless (unless they run open wireless to establish a VPN) should at the minimum be running WPA PSK, then the exposure is limited to employees and not anyone who happens to walk by.

--Tim Krabec

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Unlimited, Limited, or No Internet

With the pervasiveness of Viruses, Spyware, Trojans, Root kits and the likes. The question has to be asked, is it better to have full Anti-Virus & Anti-Malware software running on a machine with unlimited or limited internet access or is it better to run with No Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware and run 2 separate networks 1 with internet access, and 1 with out, therefore limiting the exposure to problems and data loss before there is a chance for an infection and public relations nightmare.

Some options to consider are how would you send and receive email with the people outside the company, would it be possible to have remote access to the machines? Do business owners even care about internet access and the risk of Data loss? Would businesses pay for a segmented network? Is a network with "no Internet access' really safer?

-- Tim Krabec
Kracomp.com