Episode 131: Lets Talk Security

Episode 131 Lets Talk Security

00:00

From the center of the universe, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This is the SDM show with your host Rob Cairns. The SDM show focuses on business life productivity, digital marketing, WordPress and more. Sit back, relax, grab your favorite drink and enjoy the show. Here is Rob.

00:19

Everybody, Rob Cairns here with the STM show. It’s great to be back, I kind of took a bit of a six eight week hiatus, just lots going on. Personally, business wise, professionally and I needed to take a break and reset. And what I can tell you is the podcast is back stronger than ever. I’ve got three recorded guests coming up. And today’s episode, we’re going to talk about security. It’s hot in the news. And we really need to have that frank conversation. I hope you’ll like the new intro, which you just heard, and there’ll be some more consistent outros, and lots to come down. So you know, sit back, relax, grab your favorite beverage. And listen as they give you some security tips to help you out in today’s tough world. Everybody, Rob Cairns here.

01:16

Today, I

01:17

want to talk about something that’s come to light that we need to have a frank discussion between you and I about. And that’s security. And frankly, that’s computer security. And based on solar winds, website hacking, the exchange hack, and more, we need to start to take security seriously at this point in time, you no longer can afford not to. So let’s talk about some basics. Number one, backups, you need to do a three to one backup process. That means multiple backups, different types of media, on site and off site. The way I do backups typically is I keep a seven USB drive. I keep a USB drive at a friend’s and I also keep a backup with a service called I drive. And I really like I drive I drive will do your PC in your smartphone will do both. So that helps with backups of your data. Now let’s go on to photos. Everybody says I’ve uploaded stuff to Google Photos, not an issue. I actually keep my photos in two spots, Google Photos. And because I’m an Amazon Prime member, Amazon photos, Amazon Prime gives Amazon photos, unlimited storage for free, so why not. And then again, I keep a copy on a USB drive. And I drive backs up my Amazon photos drives. So I got multiple copies of those as well. The reason you need to keep a backup off site, frankly, is if somebody something happens to your computer firefight theft, you need to make sure that you’ve got file somewhere else that you can restore on a new computer for court. So that talks a little about photos. Now, let’s go on to SaaS services like Google. We all store things on Google, Google Drive, Google, whatever. Google has a really amazing service called Google Takeout. And what Google Takeout does is export all your Google information into zip files, and then you can download them. And if you do it right in stormed in multiple places, there’s your Google backup, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and so on. I store stuff on one drive, but one drive is synced to my PC. And again, I make a backup of that on I drive and back that up to a USB drive. So that takes care of that. SAS products. Find out if your SaaS product has a way you can export the data and if so export it. And again, keep multiple backups on site and off site. websites. Here’s a biggie. I am in the website’s security business. If you want me to help you secure your website and help you backup your website, I can do that for a reasonable cost. I’ll even take care of it for you on websites for backups. I do backups at the website level and at the server level. And they keep those for three months because we’ve seen cases where hacks have gone back three months. Now, that talks a bit about backups. Let’s talk about passwords. It’s time to get a password manager and make your life easy. It passed I always recommended LastPass in there have had some unscrupulous policies and things like that lately. So what I frankly have gone to is I made a shift to bit Warden, what she is on multiple devices for free, I actually paid for it because I believe in paying for my password manager. And check out bit Warden because it makes life real easy. And honestly,

05:23

it’s amazing. And I go even one step more than a password manager, I turn on to f8 two factor authentication. And I don’t use SMS texting as to FA whenever possible, just because we’ve seen SMS sim jacking that’s happened before in the industry. And I should do a separate show just talking about sim jacking, which I’ll do. But what I do is I use Google Authenticator for everything I do, with the exception of Microsoft apps. And by the way, you can use Google Authenticator with most apps. And then on the Microsoft apps, I just find it easier to use Microsoft authenticator and have both my authentication programs on my phone. And I’ve downloaded the backup codes. So if something happens and I get locked out, I’ve got backup codes that I can get it very simple. Make your password strong passwords make them random, why you need a password manager don’t make them the same on multiple sites. Now people say we’ve got a WordPress website, you know, the folks over at wordfence offer a free two FA plugin, I use it, it works really good. Thank you guys at wordfence kudos to you for caring about the community. Or if you have the main wordfence two phase built in, or the paid wordfence premium, of course to a Facebook. So two factor authentication backups. Now let’s talk about updates for Windows and Mac. Do them regularly. Don’t stop there security patches, which can help you on website have a regime. I used to do website updates for clients once a week. Actually now I’m doing them three times a week. There’s so much going on with plugins and plugins security, that we got to be really, really careful. And I’ll dive in again into web security in a future edition of the SDM show in detail to help you guys. And I’ll try and do that next week. Beyond that, what you got to remember is you got to run your backups as frequent as possible. And I really recommend a cloud service because then you don’t have to think about I hope that helps you out with some security tips. I’m glad to be back. I’m glad to talk to all you again. It’s been a long time coming. Rob Cairns. You have an amazing day. Right? And you know what? We’ll talk all soon. love y’all. Bye for now. Thanks for listening to the STM show. Your shows your production is stunning digital marketing, and all rights are reserved. Rob can be reached by email at VIP at stunning digital marketing comm on twitter at Rob Cairns on his website, stunning digital marking calm and on his website there’s links to all his social media platforms. This show is dedicated to my late father Bruce Cairns. Dad, I miss you very much. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars make your business succeed.