And so we reach the last (our seventh) in our series of weekly blogs, all under the title “Keep it safe: Sharing with Surevine”.

To recap…

In our first post we introduced the series, with our theme of Passwords, and focussed on Password Storage.

In week 2 we took it one step further, and talked about Password Complexity.

Week 3 was Beyond Passwords and dealt with 2FA.

Week 4 we talked phone pins, and why we all need so many passwords. And that wrapped up the series on Passwords.

Week 5 we moved onto Anti-Malware, and then swiftly into Encryption in Week 6.

And so we reach the end. And I hear you all ask…

What Else?

After all that hard work, there are a few other things that you may be able to setup:

Firewall

If you have any control over your firewall, restrict any incoming services to only those that you need. Explaining firewall settings in much more detail is a big task, feel free to ask if you would like some advice.

Screensaver And Power Management

Your screensaver should activate after a short period of activity and it should lock the screen with a password. That extra 10 seconds to type in your password when you get back from the toilet might save you a lot of hassle when you discover someone jumped on your laptop while you were gone, sent abusive email to your boss and changed the operating system so all the buttons are labelled in Chinese.

Same as the screensaver, you should require a password on wake from sleep. Ideally use “hibernate” or shutdown to cold rather than sleep. There are attacks on a laptop that can extract disk encryption passwords from a sleeping machine.

Be Alert

Taking good care of what you do online is an excellent preventative for most problems. Consider it the equivalent of washing your hands regularly. If someone sprays germs at your face, you are going to suffer but if you keep your hands clean, you aren’t going to be picking up germs from public places.

Simple things like looking out for HTTPS when logging in (which a Password Manager will do a lot more efficiently than you) and never clicking links in (unsolicited) email.

There is a wealth of advice online to show you how to spot the bad things, like this phishing quiz.

Keep Us Informed

If you are working or sharing things with us, we really would like to know if there has been any IT problems or even anything unexpected at your end. The sooner we know, the sooner we can take some action to sort things out and minimise our exposure.

For example, if a website we both use looks different one day, please feel free to check in with us that it is a valid change. Maybe there was an upgrade or maybe it’s been infected with malware.

And we’re geeks, we love investigating this sort of thing.