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Safeguarding Your eMail Account - Not Just for Governors
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Here are some basic rules for securing your work and personal email account that are not always followed:
1 – Use a strong password. A strong password is typically considered to be a password that uses lower case, uppercase and alpha-numeric characters. Another quality of a good password is that it is not a word that can be found in the dictionary. Naturally do not use the word “password”, and words that can be associated with you such as your birthday, your pet’s name and so on. For example if your pet’s name is Tinkerbelle, do not use Tinkerbelle as your email password.
2 – Do not tell anyone your password if possible. In a work environment, you can allow your staff to see your Outlook Calendar and Task List and even to update your Calendar and Task List without giving them access to your email.
3 - Set your work computer screen saver to come on after just a few minutes of idle time and set it to require a password to return to the Desktop, or in a Microsoft Domain, before you walk away from your desktop, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and choose “Lock Computer”.
4 - Do not use public computers to access your email. These can have software installed, called keyloggers, that collects account names and passwords.
5 – Set a password on your Blackberry.
6 – For personal email accounts such as Yahoo and Hotmail, do not use a security question whose answer can be found online. Bad people can look up those answers and reset your password by answering your security questions. For example, the name of your High School is not a strong answer to a security question.
7 – Do not signup for any service that asks for your email and your email password. Some social networking sites do this. However, given your password, their software is able to raid your address book. In fact, never fill out a form on any web site that asks for your email password.
8 – Do have your staff maintain your network firewall and desktop anti-virus and anti-spy ware software. This will make it much harder for keyloggers to install on your computer.
9 – In an Exchange/Outlook environment, have your IT staff shut off SMTP on all desktops and have the firewall only allow SMTP traffic to and from your mail server. This is a basic step that interferes with keyloggers. Another desktop step that hinders keyloggers is not installing freeware and not opening any email attachments from unknown senders.
10 - Lastly, manage the content of your mailbox. If possible, do not write anything in an email that if your assistant forwarded to Newsday would cause problems. Avoid sarcasm. Sarcasm depends very much on the tone in which it’s read and will be misinterpreted if read by people who do not know you. And, while we are at it, let’s just delete all those jokes and funny pictures in your Inbox and Sent Items.
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