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Threats & Vulnerabilities - Using computers for business and/or personal use puts you at risk from Denial of
Service attacks (DoS), viruses/worms, e-mail scams, etc. Because most of
these threats come by way of e-mail, the best way to protect you and your
organization is to install and properly maintain an e-mail "aware" anti-virus
product.
The following are three of the best known products on the market and have a
configuration for practically every environment:
Symantec
McAfee
AVG
Sophos Antivirus
Microsoft (Live
OneCare Safety Scanner -- FREE!)
Recoverability - Another way to adequately protect your working environment is to back up one,
some or all of your systems regularly. This could mean anything from
backing up only the necessary information you need to run your business all the
way to backing up everything on your network from desktops to servers to network
equipment. Whatever your budget dictates, backing up your data can be easy
and economical; failing to do so could set you back a few days/weeks/months, or
even worse, put you out of business.
The following are two of the best known products on the market and have a
configuration for practically every environment:
Microsoft - www.microsoft.com
Symantec - www.symantec.com
Spam - Recently, the U.S. Government announced its intent to create a "do
not spam" list much like the recently created "do not call" list to cut down the
amount of spam Internet/email users receive on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, more than 90% of spam originates from [a] hackers taking
advantage of vulnerable SMTP gateways and [b] foreign countries (where U.S. laws
don't apply). Until the day comes that spam is a thing of the past,
remember two simple things in order to remain (somewhat) spam-free:
1) Always use a secondary email address (Yahoo, HotMail,
etc.) for all communications relating to vendors on the Internet, posting
information to newsgroups, etc. This way, your secondary address is
what gets distributed amongst the spam-gods.
2) Never (yes, we mean it) respond to
spam and ask to be removed from the mailing list - this only acknowledges
receipt and that your address exists.
We've tested a lot of spam-blocking utilities, but none work better than the
following:
CLIENT
Microsoft Outlook 2007/2003 - www.microsoft.com
SERVER
GFI MailEssentials - www.gfi.com
SERVICE
Postini - www.postini.com
Ever wonder what your Internet connection's bandwidth is?
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