Sunday, January 27, 2019

Safeguarding Your Data - Part 2



If you missed part 1 of this article you can read it by going to the web links provided at the end of this article.

What Is My Data?
Part 1 of this article dealt with financial insurance records. This article will deal with Cloud Email.

Cloud Email:
This is an area where it is quite common for me to see total data loss due to hacking. The Achilles heels of cloud based emails such as Gmail and Hotmail are:

1.      There is no backup of the email accounts.
2.      Once it has been hacked, the hacker may encrypt the emails and demand a ransom for their return.  There is no way to undo the ransom hack attack.
3.      By residing on the cloud the email account is subject to hack attacks 24 hours a day 365 days a year from anywhere by anyone.

Action Required:

1.      Download any important attachments to your computer and follow the two copy rule (I’ll outline the two copy rule later).

2.      Save important emails to your local computer and/or print them.

3.      Avoid leaving sensitive data on your cloud based email. Work on the premise that at some point a hacker will gain access to it. So once you have secured a copy of the emails then delete the sensitive emails.

4.      If you are using an apple device make sure that your email and contacts are included in the cloud backup.

Two Copy Rule: This is where you have at least two independent copies of data in separate or different locations or devices. In a pc example your email would be backed up to the cloud and a local hard drive or usb.   

My personal recommendation is NOT to include the cloud in the count so you should have two other backup devices AND the cloud.

My next article will continue on this topic.

Oliver Reidy is a computer technician and has been in the industry since 1981.You can contact him via email at help.desk@reidyonline.com or at the telephone numbers listed on this page. This article, and all previous articles, are available to view online at http://reidyonline.blogspot.ie/ or www.reidyonline.com/blogspot.htm

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