Cyber Sentinel Episode 005: Is Public Wifi Secure Enough to Use? Find out!
Is public wifi safe? Can your data be compromised if you're connected when you're out and about? Find out today on Cyber Sentinel. Welcome to Cyber Sentinel. I'm Alan Adcock. I'm CEO of ASC Group. We, on this show, talk about ways to defend your data and keep your company safe online. You can find us on social media at #cybersentinel and we wanna have your questions so we can answer those on our show.
Do small businesses need to be concerned about data privacy?
So yes, all businesses need to be concerned about data privacy. We see data breaches reported in the news on a regular basis. You've probably gotten a letter in the mail saying that your data had been breached. I got one of these from the National Archives, of all places, that they had disclosed all of my personal data many years ago. So, in general, small businesses don't have good data privacy policies in place and systems to secure that data. Definitely wanna review that in your organization. Make sure that that data is stored in secure locations on your network. Make sure it's encrypted and make sure that your staff are trained on how to handle this. Some industries, like the medical field, have good regulations on how to do this, through the HIPAA rulings, that they are required to adhere to, but all businesses need to be thinking about how to keep that secure data, or that sensitive data secured so they don't disclose that information on their clients on the web.
Is public wifi safe to use?
Yeah, so public wifi is an issue that comes up a lot. Everywhere you go now, there is public wifi. People are very used to connecting to public wifi access points with all their devices, their telephones, tablets, laptops. There's a lot of things to be concerned about and to think about before you get connected. Oftentimes, we'll find that people will go into an establishment, look at the wifi that's being broadcast and just pick one and connect. You don't know for sure that that is the actual establishment's wifi. If you connect to a rogue access point that someone has set up, then they're gonna be able to track all of the information you send over that access point. If you're trying to access secure systems, putting your password to login to websites, they're gonna capture all that information. So be very careful when you connect to public wifi that you're connected to the legitimate access points for that establishment and not something that's been set up as a rogue access point
I always update my computer, is there anything else I need to do?
Yeah, so, a lot of people think that updating their PC, updating their MAC, just requires them to update the operating system itself, Windows updates or your latest version of the MAC OS. That's just a small piece of the type of maintenance that needs to be done on a computer system on a regular basis. Once a machine is fully patched from the operating system standpoint, most of the attack vectors that are left are through small, third party applications. Things like Adobe Flash, your PDF readers, like Adobe Acrobat, Java, if you have Java installed. Chrome browser is one that's currently in the news now for having a lot of vulnerabilities that were recently discovered. These applications have to be updated and maintained on a regular basis. It's really hard to do that and stay current with all of those unless you have some automation behind that and that's really the kind of technology that we deploy for our clients to make sure that those updates are automatically kept current on those machines. Thank you for all your questions that have been sent in here to us on social media. You can find us at #cybersentinel. Please send in any other questions that you have so we can talk about 'em on future episodes and just stay safe online and defend your data.
