June 2006 Newsletter
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SecureThe traditional view of a hacker being a young person sat at home using their computer to access other sites has changed drastically over the past few years. Obtaining information over the Internet is becoming more corporate and in the 21st Century the hacker is more likely to be sat wearing a suit in an office block.While a Firewall can offer some protection against external access to your data there are other threats that they don't protect against. These include employee data theft, social engineering (where a hacker obtains logon information from an employee) and physical theft of IT equipment. The UK Government offer a number of sites with information on online protection, a good site on general IT Security can be found on the MI5 site here. ProtectIt is a common misconception that if you don't register under the Data Protection Act you don't have to comply with it and can't be prosecuted under it. This isn't the case, notification (the process of registering) is only part of the Act and all businesses who process personal information have to comply with other parts of the Act. One of the main points for prosecution under the Act is failing to notify, so at an annual cost of £35 it could be worth registering just to remove that threat.The definition of personal data and how it is used can be confusing, especially when that information is about a company and it's employees. The Information Commissioner's Office provides an online tool to judge if a company is exempt from notification, it can be found here. As mentioned above, exemption from notifying does not mean a company is exempt from other parts of the Act. When answering the question about holding personal information remember that information on Sole Traders is classed as personal, not corporate, information. AutomateMost people know the frustration of coming into work on a Monday morning, or after a long holiday, to an Inbox full of e-mail and having to sift through it to find the important ones. Rules in your e-mail program can help move e-mails into different folders based on sender, subject, content or a combination of these.Create separate folders for newsletters, personal e-mails and e-mails without your name in the To box and your Inbox will have fewer new messages each morning. Guides on the two most popular e-mail programs can be found by following the links below: Outlook Express here and here. Outlook here. DeliverWhen receiving a report or document in electronic format it can be very frustrating to find you have to print it out and seemingly waste paper. To help reduce the paper usage it is possible to fit more than one page of text onto a single sheet.The instructions vary between programs, but for Microsoft Word advice can be found here. For a solution that works with all programs, software such as Fineprint will give you a preview of your printout before it goes to the printer. Fineprint allows you to fit up to 8 pages to a single sheet, so with a duplex printer that can be 16 pages of text to one sheet of A4. You can also add backgrounds to any print job, allowing electronic letterhead, and delete pages to remove those pages with just one line on. EmpowerRSS sounds just like another technical buzzword but it is the technology that brings the Web to you instead of you going to it. |
