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With the very significant media coverage of “Cyber” attacks it can be seen that being secure online is about more than just having the latest antivirus installed. However it is not always obvious how significant the risk is or what what be done to be more secure.

Here I look at  2 issues that are significant causes of users getting infected with malware and some practical advice about being more secure.

Passwords, love them or hate them, they are the primary way of protecting your online identity. The password you use for an account should be treated the same way you treat your house or car keys, probably both combined in fact. Would you give them to somebody you don’t know? Hopefully not but this is exactly what you do when you use the same password for more than one account. This report shows a shocking 92% of people re-using passwords.

It isn’t reasonable to expect someone to remember a different password for every account they have, particularly as they should also be strong passwords and changed every three months. Picking appropriate passwords is something that will be covered in a future blog but for now please dont use 123456 this is used for an estimated 1 in 60 of all passwords! Using this is like leaving the keys in the car ignition, eventually someone is going to spot this and have a good time at your expense.

A practical solution is to let your PC manage the problem for you, it’s creating the problem afterall. There are a number of solutions out there but here I pick one that I have tried and found to work well.

Lastpass is a very competent solution with the benefit they have a free online solution. It is simple to use and can automatically fill in web pages making it simpler to use.  There have been security issues with Lastpass and should someone gain access to your master password they would have access to all of your passwords, however if you only have one password to remember you can make it very secure and not tell anyone. In the interest of fairness 1Password looks to offer a similar solution. In all likelihood there will be many more offerings available soon.

Just be careful to buy a legitimate copy, I image it won’t be long before a fake password manager is being distributed. If you ever see a message stating your password is insecure and this can be fixed for £39.99 by installing a password manager then please ignore it.

Another significant problem is keeping your PC up to date with all of the latest patches/releases along with identifying software that is no longer supported. Once security vulnerability is discovered it becomes a race between the vendor to release a patch and the “bad” guys to exploit the vulnerability. However once the patch is released it could be weeks before the patch gets installed.

Secunia PSI is a tool designed to do this for you. It looks at all of the programs installed on your PC and then identifies vulnerable and out of date programs. As someone who puts some effort into always having everything up to date I was interested in seeing what it could find. Following the install it detected 100 programs, 12 of which were not properly patched and 1 which was no longer supported. Secunia PSI made it very simple to update all of the programs that were out of date and I was very impressed with the simplicity of the system. This is an application that I would thoroughly recommend.

However, keeping you system completely up to date isn’t without its own problems. One of the updates affected the compatibility of it with the rest of the system another highlighted a more significant issue. I am a huge fan of Adobe Photoshop, and when CS was released in 2003 I purchased a full version of it. It was that good I never really bothered with upgrading it to one of the subsequent versions. I was and am, very happy with the original CS. Now that CS2, 3, 4 and 5 have been released the original CS has been end-of-lifed. That means should someone discover vulnerability in it there won’t be a patch. So do I buy the lasted version for £657.60 or just risk that the photos I download from the internet don’t have anything nasty?

Answers on a postcard, but no images please!

Tags: lastpass, Password, patch, Secunia, security

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 2:09 pm by Brian Bassil and is filed under Aerospace & Defence.
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