January 29, 2007
Small Business Summit February 13, 2007
Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
Small business owners who are in the NYC area, or who plan to be on February 13, 2007 may want to check out the upcoming Small Business Summit that will be taking place at the Crowne Plaza. The event, organized by Marian Banker, President of Prime Strategies and Ramon Ray, Author, Speaker and Small Business Technology Evangelist, debuted in 2006 and was an instant success.
For more information, click on the link below:
* [Please post your job openings here] *
R.L. Kuper, Inc. - Management Consulting
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
Small business owners who are in the NYC area, or who plan to be on February 13, 2007 may want to check out the upcoming Small Business Summit that will be taking place at the Crowne Plaza. The event, organized by Marian Banker, President of Prime Strategies and Ramon Ray, Author, Speaker and Small Business Technology Evangelist, debuted in 2006 and was an instant success.
For more information, click on the link below:
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January 11, 2007
Review: Grisoft AVG 7.5 Internet Security Suite
Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
If you are looking for an all-in-one desktop software solution for preventing viruses, spyware, spam, and other security issues, and at a very reasonable price, Grisoft's AVG 7.5 Internet Security Suite may be the product for you.
The product contains the following:
The product was installed on a PC running Windows XP and wizards made it very easy to install and set up. As with the installation of any new software, it is always wise to choose the check-for-updates option after the product has fully installed (usually after a reboot).
Once the suite is up and running, the entire suite can automatically check for and install updates for whichever module has an update. You want to stay current so make sure this is your setting.
The software firewall is your second line of defense, right after a hardware firewall, to prevent bad things to get onto your PC from connecting to the internet, and to prevent bad people from getting remote access to your PC.
The antivirus program updates daily or as frequently as new viruses are identified. No viruses have gotten through and so it has found none when scanning my outgoing email. You can set the antivirus program to do regularly scheduled scans of your PC.
Because my setup is such that no email actually gets onto my PC, I was unable to test the antispam feature, but others who use this product have told me that it works very well.
There is a test center application that allows quick scans to be accomplished for individual problems or for an individual user. There is also an integrated virus encyclopedia.
If I have any gripes it is with the antispyware module, and I have this gripe with all of the antispyware products on the market today. All antispyware products on the market today incorrectly flag legitimate tracking cookies that if blocked prevent legitimate income from being earned or business leads tracked. I've previously written about this in the article "Not All Cookies Are Bad". That means that the user would somehow need to know to not accept the recommendation to block certain cookies. I truly wish all the antispyware makers would fix this problem. Having made my point about this oversight in all the antispyware products on the market, the AVG antispyware module does an otherwise excellent job of finding and removing spyware that may be on your PC. You can schedule antispyware scans to run at regularly scheduled times.
The suite is competitively priced. You can buy the product with a 2-year subscription for updates for only $69.95 for a single user copy, and the price gets even better if you have multiple PCs.
Before installing and testing the suite, I previously tested Grisoft's free antivirus product, and that worked as well as the one that comes with this suite.
The bottom line. As pointed out in my article "So how secure is your PC?", it is important to protect your data, your identity, your PC. If you purchase and properly install Grisoft's AVG 7.5 Internet Security Suite, you will have taken major steps toward that goal.
* [Please post your job openings here] *
R.L. Kuper, Inc. - Management Consulting
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
If you are looking for an all-in-one desktop software solution for preventing viruses, spyware, spam, and other security issues, and at a very reasonable price, Grisoft's AVG 7.5 Internet Security Suite may be the product for you.
The product contains the following:
The product was installed on a PC running Windows XP and wizards made it very easy to install and set up. As with the installation of any new software, it is always wise to choose the check-for-updates option after the product has fully installed (usually after a reboot).
Once the suite is up and running, the entire suite can automatically check for and install updates for whichever module has an update. You want to stay current so make sure this is your setting.
The software firewall is your second line of defense, right after a hardware firewall, to prevent bad things to get onto your PC from connecting to the internet, and to prevent bad people from getting remote access to your PC.
The antivirus program updates daily or as frequently as new viruses are identified. No viruses have gotten through and so it has found none when scanning my outgoing email. You can set the antivirus program to do regularly scheduled scans of your PC.
Because my setup is such that no email actually gets onto my PC, I was unable to test the antispam feature, but others who use this product have told me that it works very well.
There is a test center application that allows quick scans to be accomplished for individual problems or for an individual user. There is also an integrated virus encyclopedia.
If I have any gripes it is with the antispyware module, and I have this gripe with all of the antispyware products on the market today. All antispyware products on the market today incorrectly flag legitimate tracking cookies that if blocked prevent legitimate income from being earned or business leads tracked. I've previously written about this in the article "Not All Cookies Are Bad". That means that the user would somehow need to know to not accept the recommendation to block certain cookies. I truly wish all the antispyware makers would fix this problem. Having made my point about this oversight in all the antispyware products on the market, the AVG antispyware module does an otherwise excellent job of finding and removing spyware that may be on your PC. You can schedule antispyware scans to run at regularly scheduled times.
The suite is competitively priced. You can buy the product with a 2-year subscription for updates for only $69.95 for a single user copy, and the price gets even better if you have multiple PCs.
Before installing and testing the suite, I previously tested Grisoft's free antivirus product, and that worked as well as the one that comes with this suite.
The bottom line. As pointed out in my article "So how secure is your PC?", it is important to protect your data, your identity, your PC. If you purchase and properly install Grisoft's AVG 7.5 Internet Security Suite, you will have taken major steps toward that goal.
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January 08, 2007
So how secure is your pc?
Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
So how secure is your pc? According to a January 7, 2007 article in the NY Times titled "Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat" by John Markoff, "the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower." Programs are secretly installing themselves "on thousands or even millions of personal computers" and then using these computers and their collective combined power to commit crimes across the Internet. For example, the article states: "Last spring, a program was discovered at a foreign coast guard agency that systematically searched for documents that had shipping schedules, then forwarded them to an e-mail address in China." Elsewhere in the article, we are told about a program that collected data from 753 infected computers, generated 54,926 log-in credentials, 281 credit card numbers, affected 1,239 companies including "35 stock brokerages, 86 bank accounts, 174 e-commerce accounts and 245 e-mail accounts" -- and that was just one file that was intercepted that had collected data over 1 month. One company that monitors such things claims there are more than 250,000 new infections daily.
There were a number of other examples, including the spam regarding a penny stock that boosted the price of the stock significantly - just long enough for whoever spawned it to make a nice profit.
Even more interesting was this paragraph that appears near the end of the article:
"Serry Winkler, a sales representative in Denver, said that she had turned off the network-security software provided by her Internet service provider because it slowed performance to a crawl on her PC, which was running Windows 98. A few months ago four sheriff’s deputies pounded on her apartment door to confiscate the PC, which they said was being used to order goods from Sears with a stolen credit card. The computer, it turned out, had been commandeered by an intruder who was using it remotely."
So now that you know about these problems, what are you doing to prevent them? Are you making the mistake of Serry Winkler and turning off your antivirus, antispyware, antimalware products, or, worse, have you failed to even install such software or ensure it is up-to-date? Are you perhaps making the ultimate error of being connected to the internet 24x7 logged in with adminstrator rights and no password? If you are accessing the internet from home via cable or dsl, do you have both a hardware firewall and a software firewall? If you have gone wireless, are you sure no one can intercept what you are doing over the air?
There are a variety of very good antivirus, antispyware, antimalware and other products to protect your computer. Some are even available for free or very low cost. Some are bundled as suites.
And before someone tries to give you the old and tired line "just get a Mac", be advised that the recent Mac vs. Windows ads have raised the profile of the Mac and Linux operating systems and attracted the interest of the bad guys. There have been an increasing number of reports regarding breaches of such machines -- perhaps not to the level of Windows machines, but that is primarily because there are fewer such machines in use. Should machines running Mac or Linux continue to grow in popularity and become a larger portion of the user community, rest assured that there are folks out there who will manage to wreak the same havoc on those machines as well.
So make sure to take all the necessary steps to ensure that your computer and data are secure. If you are a company, your responsibilities may be further defined by a variety of laws.
* [Please post your job openings here] *
R.L. Kuper, Inc. - Management Consulting
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
So how secure is your pc? According to a January 7, 2007 article in the NY Times titled "Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat" by John Markoff, "the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower." Programs are secretly installing themselves "on thousands or even millions of personal computers" and then using these computers and their collective combined power to commit crimes across the Internet. For example, the article states: "Last spring, a program was discovered at a foreign coast guard agency that systematically searched for documents that had shipping schedules, then forwarded them to an e-mail address in China." Elsewhere in the article, we are told about a program that collected data from 753 infected computers, generated 54,926 log-in credentials, 281 credit card numbers, affected 1,239 companies including "35 stock brokerages, 86 bank accounts, 174 e-commerce accounts and 245 e-mail accounts" -- and that was just one file that was intercepted that had collected data over 1 month. One company that monitors such things claims there are more than 250,000 new infections daily.
There were a number of other examples, including the spam regarding a penny stock that boosted the price of the stock significantly - just long enough for whoever spawned it to make a nice profit.
Even more interesting was this paragraph that appears near the end of the article:
"Serry Winkler, a sales representative in Denver, said that she had turned off the network-security software provided by her Internet service provider because it slowed performance to a crawl on her PC, which was running Windows 98. A few months ago four sheriff’s deputies pounded on her apartment door to confiscate the PC, which they said was being used to order goods from Sears with a stolen credit card. The computer, it turned out, had been commandeered by an intruder who was using it remotely."
So now that you know about these problems, what are you doing to prevent them? Are you making the mistake of Serry Winkler and turning off your antivirus, antispyware, antimalware products, or, worse, have you failed to even install such software or ensure it is up-to-date? Are you perhaps making the ultimate error of being connected to the internet 24x7 logged in with adminstrator rights and no password? If you are accessing the internet from home via cable or dsl, do you have both a hardware firewall and a software firewall? If you have gone wireless, are you sure no one can intercept what you are doing over the air?
There are a variety of very good antivirus, antispyware, antimalware and other products to protect your computer. Some are even available for free or very low cost. Some are bundled as suites.
And before someone tries to give you the old and tired line "just get a Mac", be advised that the recent Mac vs. Windows ads have raised the profile of the Mac and Linux operating systems and attracted the interest of the bad guys. There have been an increasing number of reports regarding breaches of such machines -- perhaps not to the level of Windows machines, but that is primarily because there are fewer such machines in use. Should machines running Mac or Linux continue to grow in popularity and become a larger portion of the user community, rest assured that there are folks out there who will manage to wreak the same havoc on those machines as well.
So make sure to take all the necessary steps to ensure that your computer and data are secure. If you are a company, your responsibilities may be further defined by a variety of laws.
Labels: data security, how secure is your pc, id, id theft, identity, identity theft, Kuper, kuper report, pc, secure, security, you
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