Network Security

The book I read to research this post was Network Security for Dummies by Chey Cobb which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. An interesting point in this book is that if you hire a network security consultant you should if he finds anything suspect on your network what will he do? You might think that he'd report it to you but actually he's under no obligation to. What if he finds a password cracker on your network that someone has installed to test the network but without your approval? I'll mention there's a good website at ciac.org which is an american government department which is surprising because normally government departments don't do the best websites normally consulting firms do the best network security sites. You obviously have to update your antivirus software weekly & run it every 2 or 3 days. You should have strong passwords which means a minimum of 8 character and a combination of upper & lower case letters, numbers & special characters. Everything that possibly can should have a unique password. If you have accounts on the internet you should vary your email adresses & password. Your server should be locked away if someone goes in that room ideally things like their baggage should be searched in case they're copying information from the server onto ie a flash drive. In fact ideally the person should be searched. A final interesting point is the W3C made a statement that the safest kind of website is a barebones mac running a barebones website. That was made prior to OSX coming out which despite being comparatively safe has got its own issues. Also if you run a database & have ecommerce on your website that obviously has vulnerabilities.