While that strategy may help some, it is far from being a reliable way to protect your network. First of all, without performing some technical detective work, it is hard for a non-IT professional to tell who the e-mail came from anyway. You may get an e-mail from a cybercriminal who uses “spoofing” to make the e-mail message appear that it is coming from your best friend, bank, the FTC, or anyone else.

Better protection comes from scanning tools running at one or more locations including your e-mail server, your firewall, your spam filter, and the anti-virus client on your local machine.

Training users “not to open e-mail from strangers” is a moot point if your user is supposed to open e-mail messages from prospects interested in your company’s products and/or services.  There is some training that matters though…

Train your users to NEVER click on a link in an e-mail message. The link may say to the user, “click here to read an important announcement about your future employment at this company” and the link underneath may take the user to, “hose the network now dot com.”

Also train the users to never send out any private information in an e-mail message or attachment. The message can be misaddressed, intercepted or forwarded to the wrong person. If something is private, it needs to be encrypted using an effective encryption method. In another blog entry I addressed data loss prevention tools that can even help identify these messages and stop them before they leave your organization.

If your executives or other users use the strategy of “not opening mail from someone they don’t know,” that is a red flag alerting you to a problem you can resolve ASAP.

The post Does it help not to open e-mail from strangers? appeared first on Foster Institute.

Other people say once you use full-disk encryption, it becomes almost impossible for the end user to use the computer. That was true at one point, but today, if I want to lock my laptop, all I have to do is use the Windows L key combination and the computer locks, or I can just set the computer to lock automatically if I walk away for very long. Then whenever I want to get back in, I can take any one of my 10 fingers and swipe it across the fingerprint reader that is on the front of the laptop. Now I’m ready to go again and can access all the data on the system.

People also tell me that encryption is slow. It’s not. I use my laptop to run large and involved programs all the time, so I need speed. And I have overkill encryption on my machine just to prove to audiences how fast it is. I have my data locked or encrypted three different ways, and it only needs to be encrypted once. This is to demonstrate the speed.

So in a nutshell, full-disk encryption security is inexpensive, it’s easy for the user, it’s very important to have, and it’s easy for your IT administrators, too. So it’s time to be secure, and full-disk encryption is a great start to having some peace of mind.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

The post Are You Looking for Security That’s Fast, Cheap, and Easy? appeared first on Foster Institute.