Tag Archive for: preventative

Data Doctors: Preventative maintenance tips for your computer

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What preventative maintenance tasks should I be doing to help my computer run better? Data Doctors’ Ken Colburn has some tips.

Q: What preventative maintenance tasks should I be doing to help my computer run better?

A: As with many other items in daily life, preventative maintenance is the key to avoiding expensive repairs that often come as a surprise.

Imagine driving your car until it broke down instead of regularly changing the oil, checking tire pressure, etc. The resulting costs could be enormous or you could end up stranded on the side of the road in hazardous conditions.

With your computer, both the expensive surprises and loss of use can be avoided if you get in the habit of routinely performing some basic tasks.

Preventing data loss

If you think about it, your physical computer isn’t really what is the most important thing — it’s your personal data that counts the most.

Establishing a regular backup, preferably off site for the best security, is essential. You can certainly use an external backup that is connected to your computer, with software to do automatic backups; but it won’t be much help in the event of a fire, flood, theft or the ever-growing threat of ransomware.

Off-site backup services, such as Carbonite, provide better protection from threats, which, combined with a local backup drive, provides three copies of your data for the ultimate backup strategy.

Preventing a full hard drive

Today’s solid-state hard drives are incredibly fast but are often smaller than their traditional magnetic counterparts because they cost a lot more.

If you aren’t paying attention or completely ignore the system warnings that your hard drive is getting full, it can lead to data corruption and much slower performance. Your computer uses free hard drive space for temporary files, so keeping at least 20% of it available is important.

Windows has a disk cleanup utility that makes it simple to free up space, while Mac users can follow these steps from Apple to do the same.

Take a few minutes on a monthly basis to review the programs you have installed to see if you are really using them. If not, uninstall…

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Basic Preventative Steps for Organizations

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Thursday, September 23, 2021

The Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently issued a Ransomware Profile* identifying steps organizations can take to prevent, respond to and recover from ransomware events**. According to the profile, its “purpose…is to help organizations identify and prioritize opportunities for improving their security and resilience against ransomware attacks.” NIST encourages organizations to use the document as a guide for profiling the state of their own readiness and to identify gaps to achieve their goal.

IN DEPTH

Modeled on NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework Version 1.1, the profile provides practical guidance to organizations to protect against the ransomware threat, including the following “basic preventative steps”:

  • Use antivirus software at all times;

  • Keep computers fully patched, including scheduled checks and installation of patches “as soon as feasible”;

  • Segment networks;

  • Continuously monitor directory services (and other primary user stores) for indicators of compromise or active attack;

  • Use products or services to block access to server names, IP addresses, or ports and protocols that are known to be malicious or suspected to be indicators of malicious system activity;

  • Allow only authorized applications—including establishing processes for reviewing, adding or removing authorized applications—on an allowlist;

  • Use standard user accounts versus accounts with administrative privileges whenever possible;

  • Restrict personally owned devices on work networks;

  • Avoid using personal apps—like email, chat and social media—from work computers;

  • Educate employees about social engineering; and

  • Assign and manage credential authorization for all enterprise assets and software, and periodically verify that each account has the appropriate access only.

The profile outlines steps that organizations “can take now” to help recover from a future ransomware event, including:

  • Develop and implement an incident recovery plan that has defined roles and strategies for…

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When it comes to zero-day vulnerabilities, the best approach is preventative action – ITProPortal

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When it comes to zero-day vulnerabilities, the best approach is preventative action  ITProPortal
“zero day exploit” – read more