Around our house, we’ve been watching Discovery Channel’s ‘The Colony’.  In this week’s episode, (spoiler alert!) the colonists knew they had security issues.  They knew someone could break in to steal items or just make a mess of the place.  Instead of taking care of their problem, though, they chose to build a shower.  The predictable result: marauders got in the building & chaos ensued.  Afterwards (also predictable), the colonists finally worked on security.  Too late – they already lost some of the supplies & peace of mind.

This happens with computers much more often than you might think.  From the home computer user all the way up to the largest enterprise, security is an easy thing to push aside.  After all, you’re busy & nothing’s going wrong right now.  However, think of the time & effort to do just the simplest things to secure your computer vs. the time & effort to remove a virus, spyware, or need to recover data from a backup.

Take some time right now to do these things:

• Make sure your operating system & application patches are up to date.
• Verify that your antivirus & antispyware software is enabled & has the latest signature applied.
• Check that your computer’s firewall software is running & is up to date.
• If you haven’t done it in a while, change your password!  Make it a strong one by using a secure random password generator.
• Turn off your preview panel in your e-mail client if it is enabled.  A preview is the same as opening that e-mail you’re not sure about.
• If you use a wireless access point in a home office, enable its firewall.
• Back up your data – just in case something does penetrate your shields, you may need to recover.

There are many, many more items that you can do to better secure your computers.  These 7 should be your first swipes at the bad guys.  Don’t wait until something starts to go wrong like the colonists did this week.  By then, it’s already too late!

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