Hello, readers! I expect a lot of you are still working from home! Hopefully by now you’ve made a nice little office for yourself and aren’t still using an ironing board as a desk. My guess is that we will be working from home a lot more in the future and guess what? The holidays are fast approaching! I’m going to help you get everything on your holiday gift list to optimize your home office.
With the work-from-home extending longer than many of us anticipated, not to mention the countless companies that are allowing remote work to become a permanent option, now is a great time to take a look at some common (and easy) steps to secure your home network.
Following these steps will keep you out of the “low-hanging fruit” category for attackers, not only for work, but for your personal activities and devices as well. It’s easy to understand why you wouldn’t want to unwittingly expose your work data to attackers (no-one wants that call from HR), but most people don’t notice how interwoven personal and professional data is. A successful attack on your personal accounts and devices often results in a successful attack on the professional side as well.
I’ve twice discussed SSL (here and here), the encryption method that protects your web browsing traffic. If you’re on Youtube as much as me, you’ve seen VPN commercials that say they protect your browsing, but they’re REALLY exaggerating the amount of security they add for that scenario (I’ll have to do a blog about that next). I’ve also done a blog about how internet routing works, in which I mentioned DNS, but I’ve not done a full description of how it really works.
Back when Windows 10 first released, one of the things I liked the most was being able to make my screen ‘look nice’. Windows 7 was fine, but in retrospect, didn’t offer much in terms of keeping house. Windows 8 was a mess and if you’re still using it, I’m sorry. Windows 10 was where usability really came into its own and I want to spread the word about how I like to have it set up and why.
