Risk & Business Magazine General Insurance Services Fall 2019 | Page 30

BUCHERTECH
BUCHERTECH
COMPUTER SECURITY
“TOTO, I HAVE A FEELING WE ARE NOT
IN KANSAS ANYMORE”
W
hen Dorothy uttered
those famous words in
the 1939 movie, The
Wizard of Oz, little did
she know that she would
be quoted so many times in the years since
then, but it certainly rings true regarding
the securing of your computers 80 years
later!
Consider the following timeline of
computer security:
1980 – Security was making a periodic
backup of your data, often stored on
multiple floppy disks!
1990 – With the advent of the internet,
antivirus software now became necessary.
2000 – Email spam became a real problem,
and the spam blocker was created. Also, we
started utilizing passwords.
2010 – Multiple security solutions started
arriving on the scene, including more
powerful firewalls and applying Windows
updates became an ongoing process.
TODAY – Many more tools have arrived
on the scene to help protect you, including
Malware protection, monitoring tools to
notify you when there is an issue, employee
training and testing tools, password
managers, and multi-factor authentication.
Data backups have evolved to be an
ongoing process, happening as often as
every 15 minutes.
It isn’t a coincidence that the number of
tools has increased in recent years. With
the attacks firms of all sizes have been
victims of, securing your devices has
become more and more of a challenge.
For the sake of space, here is just one of
the more recent solutions that businesses
should consider.
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Password Management: When it comes to
managing your passwords, I have identified
four types of users:
1. Users that have the same password for
everything. This is a recipe for disaster as
sooner or later one of their websites will
get hacked and then the whole world has
access to all of your information.
password and the password manager takes
it from there!
Why take all of these security measures?
Internet criminals are hard at work. If you
are not proactive, you are at risk to be their
next victim because Toto, we are not in
Kansas anymore!
2. Users that have unique passwords for
each site, and write them in a log that is in
their top left or right drawer. This is better
in that only the people that have access
to the top drawers can access all of their
confidential info stored in the internet.
Unfortunately, this can be a lot of people.
3. Users that memorize a variety of catch
phrases with a variety of schemes to login
to websites. This is better in that they are
unique and safe, but this becomes quite
challenging to manage and segregate all of
those passwords in your head.
4. Users that utilize a password manager to
manage all of their unique passwords.
Of the four methods listed above, the
password manager is clearly the best
solution. Since you access many sites that
need to be secured, why not utilize a tool
that can keep track of all of them. If you
consider that you have automated many
tasks that you used to do manually, why
not use a tool to manage passwords? This
will allow you to utilize your brainpower
to be creative in solving business problems
and creating new solutions instead of
memorizing letters, numbers and special
characters!
Please note, we do not recommend
using your computer browser to be your
password manager. All it takes is someone
to hack or steal your PC and they have
all of your passwords. Instead, there are
many online password managers available.
You just memorize one long and secure
BY: TIM BUCHER
Born in Valparaiso, Tim attended
Morgan Township High School and
in 1979 graduated from Purdue with
B.S. in General Management. He
worked for four years at Midwest Steel
as Financial planner and programmer.
In 1983 he became the first full time
employee of Chester Technologies. In
1996 he was elected to the East Porter
County School board which included
stints as Vice President and President.
In 2001 he started Buchertech, focusing
on small business solutions. Buchertech
moved their offices in 2015 to downtown
Valparaiso at 6 Michigan Ave., historic
McMahan Center. Currently Buchertech
employees total 21, providing managed
services and many different security
solutions to organizations throughout
the region.