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Keep Your Guard Up.

 

You’d have to live in a cave (without television or the internet) not to know security and privacy are the catchwords of the IT industry in 2018.

Or perhaps a desert island. Or the moon.

Even then, it would be hard to escape the constant barrage of news item after news item telling of the latest breach of data or inadvertent sharing of personal data to the dark web (or worse).

It’s why a recent article at RollCall.com entitled Fearing New Government Rules, Tech Titans Promise Security Vigilance caught our attention. Representatives from some of the largest tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, CISCO, IBM, McAfee, Symantec and others, gathered recently at the RSA Conference in San Francisco to discuss what measures each (and all) might take to better insure the privacy each of us expects in our online existence.

Perception is Reality

If each of us is truthful, you and I both know data we post on the internet—whether an email address, phone number, family recipe for grandma’s chicken soup or a picture of our chihuahua “Bruiser”—enters to some extent into the public domain. We can wish it wasn’t so. But it’s fact. Still, the Facebook situation with Cambridge Analytica brought home just how vulnerable our data is.

And it’s only getting more complicated. The article gives this sobering fact:

Manufacturers are said to be shipping out 9 billion such internet-connected units each year, including baby monitors, voice-activated personal assistants and remotely operated door locks. As many as 200 billion such devices could be connected to the internet by 2020, or an average of about 26 for every person on earth.

Keep Your Guard Up

If the big companies are taking it seriously, you should be, too. Part of your relationship with Carolinas Net Care is enhanced security. We find the patches, test the patches and install the patches. We keep your software up to date. We do the heavy lifting so you can enjoy the benefit of higher levels of security.

Postcript

In an ironic postscript to the story came this article, When You Go to a Security Conference, and its Mobile App Leaks your Data, courtesy of ArsTechnica.

The headline says it all—but give it a five-minute read.

It’s a crazy world out there.

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