If you’ve been looking for just the right motivation or evidence to convince your company’s IT department to upgrade to Windows 7, this may be it. The National Security Agency (NSA) issued a datasheet of best practices for keeping your computer and network safe and secure, and one of the suggestions in the document is to “migrate to a modern OS and hardware platform.” In short: upgrade to Windows 7 if you’re still using Windows XP.
The datasheet, titled Best Practices for Keeping Your Home Network Secure, is written for home users, not corporate or government networks, but it does make suggestions like upgrading to Windows 7 (or even Windows Vista, anything but Windows XP) and going with a 64-bit version because it “increases the effort for an adversary to attain a system or root compromise.”
That’s not the only suggestion in the document however – there are additional suggestions for Windows users like making sure to install a comprehensive security suite and keep it up to date, limit the use of the Administrator account, and migrate to Microsoft Office 2007 or later if you’re going to use Office at all. The datasheet goes on to make similar recommendations for Apple users, like making sure to keep their OS up to date and to limit the use of the Administrator account as well. There’s even a tip about enabling data protection on your iPad.
The NSA’s suggestions then go on to making sure your home network – especially wireless networks – are secure and set up properly. Wireless LANs at home should have WPA2 turned on, and there’s even a note about how weak WEP is. They also suggest using an alternate DNS service than your service provider’s, and to try and find one that blacklists malicious web sites.
As one reader at Slashdot notes, the document makes no mention of Linux or BSD, but considering the audience of the NSA datasheet, it may not have been necessary. Still, most – if not all – of the suggestions are applicable to end users who work anywhere and want to keep their home computers and their personal or professional data safe.
Read more at
NSA.gov (PDF)
Need a simple easy to use FREE PDF viewer/editor have a look at
PDF-XChange Viewer, want to create PDF files on the fly FREE look no further than
CutePDF Writer
