The IT Guys Blog

The ICO in the UK told reporters that they are considering criminal punishment for individuals who lose unencrypted laptops. I think they may need to tweak that statement a bit to say “companies who don’t use encrypted laptops will be punished”. They can’t really expect the individuals to understand and implement encryption technology, can they? I like where they are going with this though. If you are going to carry data in a non-secure laptop with other peoples personal information than your company should face criminal charges if it’s lost or stolen. When CEO’s face serious charges for these offenses than the security that should already be in place will magically appear and you will see less of these cases. Recently GAP Inc. had a similar case where a laptop containing a years worth of job applicants data was lost.

“Cost shouldn’t ever be used as an excuse to have poor security and it won’t help you in court when you’re getting sued.”

Source: ComputerWorld UK

It takes a lot to stay motivated in an IT position. It always starts out busy and fun, but that’s rarely the tune IT Guys are singing after a year or more. The problem is really that IT Guys, or at least some, are so good at making their lives easy that they become bored. When you first start a new job it’s foreign and you don’t know the best way to get things done yet. A year into that position and you will likely have mastered the job. With your new found ninja IT skills, tasks that once took you half a day now take you 30 minutes or less. This leads to big gaps of empty time. The time isn’t really empty though, the good IT guys are researching and testing during this time. It may sound trivial to some but the sign of a good IT Guy isn’t someone who is constantly busy. The sign of a good or great IT Guy is someone who recognizes his or her downtime and creates projects or furthers their learning.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t been nominated yet make sure somebody nominates you! The prizes aren’t bad; anybody can use a case of RedBull
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A recent study conducted by McAfee found that 90% of respondents said they were using an antivirus that updated either daily or weekly. In actuality, 49% didn’t even have an antivirus at all or if they did it was not updating. The actual results can be read here.

Although there are a lot of bells and whistles the average user can live with out these days, a good antivirus isn’t one of them. I’m not going to pick favorites here, but make sure whatever you are using it isn’t some no name knock off brand. When I was a consultant we had a home division and we would offer a terrible knock off antivirus to customers who didn’t want to pay for name brand stuff. It worked pretty well at actually detecting viruses, but an update came out for it one year and it started blue screening computers. I never worked in the home division, but I can remember them taking in about fifty or so computers over the course of only a few days, all due to this antivirus update.

Keep in mind that once your computer is actually infected by a virus or trojan  removing it becomes extremely difficult. It’s a very bad plan to wait until you have problems to buy an antivirus, because you might also wind up paying to have your hard drive re-formatted and re-loaded to get rid of it.

Source Sunnet Beskerming

This is just too funny not to run. Kim Jung Il told reporters “I’m an Internet Expert” during talks with South Korea’s President today.

Source: Physorg Science and Technology News.

“The Onion” ran a story today where they put a date on the buyers remorse, which many of the wall street firms are claiming will hit home in the months to come. Mark March 21, 2008 down on your calendar as the day the apple died.

“At the current rate, we believe that at this time a sea change will occur in which people will look down at their glossy white or black devices and feel a sense of embarrassment and gullibility,” Goldman Sachs analyst Steven Shore said. “They will realize that, despite all the sleek design, they got caught up in a wave of hype that made them shell out additional hundreds of dollars for options and features they didn’t need. Until then, I would like to point out that my iPhone is awesome.”

Anyone who spends $699 for a cell phone must have a lot of discretionary income and doesn’t mind spending it on electronics that will plummet in price and popularity fast. That or they just got caught in the fad of the iEVERYTHING. Apple could make a five hundred dollar coffee mug tomorrow, the iMug, and I guarantee you they’d sell at least a few thousand of them. When you find yourself digging a few hundred dollars out of your pocket for something with an i in front of it’s name consider why you need such a device. Do they not make cheaper cell phones that also hold mp3s? Do you even want a cell phone that holds mp3s? And if you do, consider the fact that early adopters always pay a premium. The premium isn’t always monetary either; you don’t want to be the next guy riding through the neighborhood on a Segway, do you?

Source: Reuters

A computer containing 800,000 recent job applicants data including social security numbers and personal information was recently stolen from Gap Inc. Gap is pointing the finger at the vendor who apparently assured Gap that the data was encrypted and kept in a safe manor. Now any job applicant at Banana Republic, Gap, and Old Navy that applied since July of 2006 needs to worry. Gap is offering a year of free credit monitoring service and a charge dispute resolution service for the affected applicants.

Gap stands to learn a stiff lesson from this mistake, you can’t point the finger at a vendor you picked when they mess up. A business associate’s agreement will not save you when 800,000 people’s social security numbers become public. It may give Gap grounds to sue the vendor, but guess who will be stated as the defendant on this class action suit? Companies need to realize that just because they pick a vendor who guarantees security, it needs to be verified. We work with a few Indian corporations and I’ve repeatedly caught them trying to do unsafe things. From putting a printer right on the internet to sending data in an non-secure and non-encrypted way. Nobody who works with us should have to worry if the vendors we chose are using safe practices, that’s solely our responsibility.

Full Story at Reuters

Further proof that Microsoft clearly dropped the ball on Vista. They are extending production of Windows XP an additional five months, which is likely to be pushed even further back as June grows closer. I wont buy Vista for our corporate desktops until Bill invents an OFF button for all the “security features.” Supporting a new operating system always increases overhead but Vista’s security creates a whole new challenge. It’s 2007 no vendor should be releasing software updates or new versions that aren’t self explanatory.

Bill Quoted Saying: “Vista is so secure it could run life support systems.”

When these polls roll every year I always wonder where these people are working? Not only do they say that 49% of Tech workers have admitted falling asleep on the job but 44% admit they’ve kissed a co-worker and 25% admitted drinking alcohol on the job. If I had to guess I would say these people work at large companies where they are in very specialized fields. I’ve seen IT dept’s where they have 25 or so employees and then their sister data center in TX had another 30. When you get 25 guys in IT and it’s so specialized that your job is just to work with routing or content filtering you tend to find more time to goof off.

Article from ITNews

Full Story at the Telegraph

Major PC Manufacturers such as Dell have begun to offer alternatives to Windows Vista. Vista was launched in January of this year with great hype. Like all new “must have” products people camped out in the parking lots of retailers to be the first to get their hands on a copy of this ground breaking operating system. You know times aren’t tough when thousands of people pitch tents to wait for a freaking operating system or a cell phone Here we are 8 months later and the verdict is in, Vista sucks.

Sorry Bill, good security isn’t asking me every 15 seconds if I want to let something happen. If I click on something, guess what, I want it to happen! Vista for the workplace is an even worse idea. Most business users aren’t computer savvy enough to know if they want kulsvc124.exe to run anyway. Half the time IT Guys don’t know off hand what a particular process or application is. Case and point: we use Trend Micro Officescan for our corporate desktop protection. It does a pretty good job but it has an application that runs as a random name every time the system boots to prevent malware from disabling it. How would our users ever know if they could trust a random name? Lastly don’t require me to run special hardware or tons of RAM. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave but it’s also the land of the cheap and the home of Walmart. Americans want things cheap, simple, and worry free. Apple does so well because they mastered the last two. Microsoft decided to flip the table and make it expensive, complicated, and a pain.

The secret to a secure operating system isn’t in validating every program or process that may startup. It’s in eliminating the vulnerabilities in the first place. Sure protect the files that the system relies on but do it in a way that doesn’t cause me to make a decision about every little thing. When major manufacturers like Dell start offering Windows XP in place of the new Vista take note, because people want new technology. If they aren’t getting it from Microsoft they’ll get it somewhere else.