Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: security

  • ABC702 Weekends: Facebook and your Family

    ABC702 Weekends: Facebook and your Family

    For the first 702Sydney Weekend program for the year ABC 702 Sydney Paul Wallbank and Ian Rogerson looked at how to use Facebook safely.

    Facebook and other social media services are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, so it’s important we understand the benefits and the risks involved in using the web.

    All the details of what we discussed in the program are available at the Facebook and Your Family post.

    One listener’s question we said we’d get back to was Emma who asked about Microsoft Word stopping her Mac from closing down.

    This is usually due to problems with an office plug in or the normal template. To attempt to fix the template, follow the instructions at the Word Mac site.

    As Ian suggested, it may be time to consider a more up to date program as Office 2001 is seriously outdated.

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  • Facebook and Families

    Facebook and Families

    As the Internet has become a normal part of our family lives, social media services like Facebook are becoming important in the way people, particularly our kids, socialise and communicate.

    Most of this web use is positive however there are risks with these online tools so we do need to know how to manage social media services and reduce any problems we may have in our families and businesses.

    Understand the risks

    Facebook is an online service and all web based platforms share the same risks such as stranger danger, bullying, fraud and offensive behaviour – both kids and adults need to understand the risks.

    A good start is sitting down with younger kids and using some of the online resources available, the US Virginia Department of Education has a good interactive presentation on online safety.

    For Australian specific content, the Federal government’s Cyber Smart website offers advice to families at all ages; from grandparents to kids.

    Respect the rules

    All online services have rules that govern behaviour, one of the most common is a restriction on under 13s. This is partly because of the US COPPA law that restricts websites and social media services from advertising to children.

    Of the other rules that can cause problems Facebook has bans on hate speech and an almost pathological obsession with nudity. It pay to read the terms and conditions so you know what is acceptable.

    Under 13s should not use Facebook

    While for many kids Facebook is the way to talk to their friends online, parents should resist the pressure to sign their kids up until they are of the legal age.

    Regardless of what you think of the rules, many kids don’t have the maturity of to understand or deal with the issues of using social media sites. For that matter, neither do many adults.

    Should Facebook find out that an account is owned by a child under 13, they will shut it down immediately.

    Choose your friends carefully

    Everybody – kids and adults – should be cautious about friends they make online. Just accepting friend requests from anybody, or from those who look cute or cool, can lead to problems later.

    Set your privacy

    In Facebook you should set your default privacy settings to “Friends”. You can do this by clicking the arrow pointing down in the top right hand corner of the Facebook screen and selecting privacy.

    Having set your default privacy settings to Friends, you may want to further improve your privacy by continuing down the privacy screen and selecting functions like not allowing friends to post to your Facebook wall.

    Be careful what you like

    Liking products and pages can have consequences, at the very least others know what causes you’ve joined.

    Joining hate or bullying campaigns or pages is not a good look, so don’t do it if you think you may upset people around you.

    You are what you post

    Anything you put online is in writing against your name. If it’s going to upset people or cause trouble then don’t do it.

    In the United States one teenager found this out the hard way when her father discovered a Facebook post criticising him and her mother. He shot her laptop and then posted the video onto her Facebook page.

    Practice Safe Computing

    Services do get hijacked, so have strong passwords, up to date virus checkers and make sure the computer is fully up to date with security patches.

    Never share passwords with friends or siblings and use different passwords on each service so if Minecraft gets compromised, Facebook or email doesnt’ as well.

    Put computers in common areas

    Kids’ computers should be in common areas and use of any Internet enabled devices like iPods and mobile phones in places like bedrooms should be strongly discouraged.

    Be open to talking

    If anyone in your family seems to have a problem with computer use such as getting upset, socially withdrawal or acting unusually then talk to them. This happens with adults as well.

    One thing to remember is that punishing people, particularly kids, rarely works well with these technologies so it’s best to make it clear they won’t be in trouble if they come to you with a problem they are having on the net.

    It’s not just kids

    We have to remember its not just kids who get into trouble online, there’s no shortage of adults who have created problems for themselves and their families through irresponsible online behaviour. So parents need to watch their own social media usage as well.

    Should someone in your family be having a problem, then don’t hesitate to talk to the school, employer or Internet provider if there’s issues that need to be addressed.

    There’s lot of online services services and resources such as Cybersafe listed above. Also don’t hesitate to call any support lines such as Lifeline or Beyond Blue if you are seriously concerned about a family member’s wellbeing.

    On balance, the web and social media are positive influences on most people’s lives so by using commonsense and playing safely, the majority of families will avoid the really terrible stories we hear about online problems.

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  • The importance of logging off

    The importance of logging off

    English Labour MP Tom Watson today learned why logging off your computer is important when his office intern cracked what she thought a joke on his behalf.

    What appeared to be a mis-step by the Member of Parliament bought predictable criticism from his enemies in politics and media, particularly given his role as a critic of News International.

    The biggest risk in computer security are your staff and co-workers; they have access to your systems and the data saved on them.

    In Tom’s case – like most business security breaches – the intern wasn’t being malicious, she was making a very valid point about a serious topic, it was her unfortunate choice of words that caused a problem.

    Luckily for her, the boss has taken a mature attitude towards the problem – there’s many bosses who wouldn’t. So the intern seems safe unless the media can beat the story up further.

    The moral for all of us is to log off or shut down our computers whenever we step away from them.

    If we’re using public terminals in flight lounges, Internet cafes or hotels, then we should make sure we’ve logged out of our email, social media or banking services before the session ends.

    Should someone leap on your system when you turn your back, you could find anything from your social media or email account used to send out fake messages about you being robbed through to your online bank balance being pillaged.

    We often worry about evil, sophisticated hackers breaking into our accounts but often it’s these simple mistakes that let opportunistic thieves get our details.

    Often it’s the simple things that bring us unstuck, so logging off is a good habit to get into. Tom’s intern is right.

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  • Megaupload, cloud computing and trust

    Megaupload, cloud computing and trust

    The closing down of file sharing site Megaupload has raised the question of trust in the cloud; “It has made cloud services look that much less legitimate” one daily paper quotes futurist Mark Pesce as saying.

    For those of us advocating cloud services and advising businesses on using them, this trust issue isn’t anything new. All of us have to be careful about who we trust with our data and Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, doesn’t come to mind as someone who would stand a great deal of due diligence.

    Like investments – another area where trust is essential – we have to spread our risk around. Saving copies of data to your own computer and making sure the information you save on the cloud is in a form easily read by different systems is important, as is not trusting any one service for critical services.

    The taking down of Megaupload also raises other questions – as privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein points out;

    “But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused — not yet convicted — of engaging in a crime.

    What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.

    They are — to use the vernacular — screwed.”

    It’s this over-reaction by government agencies which is the real concern and the co-operation of large corporations in shutting down services – as we saw with the shutting down of Wikileaks – probably does more to damage trust in all online services, not just cloud computing.

    Cloud services are no less trustworthy than our computer systems, all of which can breakdown, catch viruses or be compromised by staff making mistakes. We have to understand that all technologies carry some degree of risk.

    For businesses and home users, we need to spread the risks around – don’t just trust one service or technology to deliver your products or services and have a fall back plan if things go wrong.

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  • Password blues

    Password blues

    “Johnny down the street hacked my Minecraft account!” is something almost every parent today has heard in one way or another.

    If you believed the kids, the schools are full of 12 year old hacking geniuses that can unravel passwords faster than a CIA super computer.

    Usually it turns out the “evil hacker” in Grade 5 had the password all along as the kids share their login details with all their friends.

    The New York Times recently pulled together story showing how teenagers are sharing passwords to show their affection. One wonders how many abusive relationships see the dominant partner control the other’s social media and online accounts.

    It isn’t just kids and teenagers who find themselves in trouble though, businesses make the same mistakes. Commonly sharing a password to important files and tech functions across the organisation.

    Thinking this is just a small business problem would be a mistake; Australia’s Vodafone made all their entire customer base available on the Internet thanks to single logins and shared passwords for each of their dealers.

    Over the years this caused major problems for customers and the honest Vodafone dealers as their unscrupulous competitors hijacked accounts and churned clients to new plans. The cost to Vodafone Australia must have been huge but impossible to quantify given they apparently had no tracking mechanism to figure out who had accessed accounts.

    In households and business, the main reason we share passwords is convenience – security by nature is always inconvenient. It’s convenient not to bother locking your front door or leaving your keys in the car.

    When you really value something, you lock it up and you don’t give a key to everyone in your neighbourhood. It should be the same with passwords, keep them strong and keep them secret.

    Our kids learn this the hard way, we shouldn’t have to.

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