Threat Level has been Elevated to Red. Moving to Defcon 1

Ok….  first thing… take a deep breath and relax.  Neither of those things have happened.  In fact, the color-coded system from Homeland Security has been replaced, so the next time one of your friends or co-workers tells you what color it is, tell them to get with the times.  (See?  Storehouse of useless information.)  Why…

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Making Email Work for Business

Email.  It’s probably one of the more boring technical subjects out there, and yet probably one of the most important business functions for our customers.  No one ever talks about email, until there is a problem.  Statistically, there are now more emails exchange in a day than phone calls.  Heck, that’s actually been true for…

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Guide to Creating Strong Passwords

Why do I need a strong password? We want to believe that we live in a world where people “just do the right thing”, but experience tells us that is not true.  Mavidea requires the use of strong passwords because we understand that there is an Internet “underground” full of people who cause damage and…

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Gone Phishing…

One of the things we warn our clients about is “social engineering.”  With the array of anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-malware programs on the market, the bad guys have been forced to get sneakier.  Social engineering is all about getting you, the user, to perform some action which provides the bad guys with what they want…

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Starbucks is now offering free public WiFi – Using public WiFi hotspots securely (part 2)

A few months ago I wrote about some of the dangers in using public WiFi hotspots (http://mavidea.com/media/mavlog/10-07-01/Using_public_WiFi_hotspots_securely_part_1.aspx)  The article was received well and customers asked me questions, which is exactly what I wanted.  Security is an ongoing discussion that never ends. A few weeks ago, Starbucks made WiFi free in all of their stores (http://www.starbucks.com/coffeehouse/wireless-internet). …

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