Everyone here at nGenuity is very thankful for the past successful year. We couldn’t have done it without the support of our friends, family, and loyal customers. Enjoy the holidays, the New Year is just around the corner.

If you can actually remember all of the places you signed up for accounts over the years and the unique passwords for those accounts you can stop reading this now.

All the rest of you still reading should know that passwords are an important part of keeping prying eyes from your data (and probably have just as hard of a time remembering passwords as I do.) Passwords are very similar to a combination for a safe. Know the right combination and it is easy to obtain the contents. If you don’t happen to know the combination you could try a whole bunch of combination in succession and eventually get the combination. The key word there is eventually. While there are other limiting factors such as frequency of guesses and other controls that I’m going to ignore for the sake of this introduction, passwords for the most part protect against time. The more complex, the more difficult it is to guess, the longer it should supposedly take to obtain the right one.

Make password management easy on yourself and get a password safe application like Password Gorilla. If you are wondering why you need one of these applications here is just a few reasons.

• Remembers your passwords for you (in an encrypted vault!)
• Passwords can be as complex and long as you want them to be.
• You have a convenient list of passwords so that when the New Year comes around you can change them, all of them.
• You can keep information, such as answers to “security questions” in the notes field. You don’t have to use answers like “What is the name of your first pet?  Max”  Instead make them just as complex as your passwords.
• Password Gorilla is cross-platform and works on Windows, OS X and Unix systems. No excuses here!

We all know you aren’t going to go to the gym like you need to, so why not pick a New Year resolution that is attainable, like caring about strong password management, one of the most basic principles in security.

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. It gives all of us that are security focused the opportunity to spread some information about security and safety to others.

To do our part DC509 is putting on another community outreach event. This time it’s going to be bigger and better than ever. We have 4 speakers on the agenda this time, speaking on a wide variety of topics. To not put the audience to sleep, each speaker will have 15 minutes to speak and 15 minutes for Q&A. Please join us and show support for helping to secure our community.

Speakers:

• Aaron Howell – Phishing; Don’t take the bait
• Adam Baldwin – Building trust with website visitors
• Lynda True – Information sharing on social networks
• Thomas Feduk, Jr – Basic best practices for staying safe online

You can find out more information about the event by going to ngenuity-is.com/events or more information about National Cyber Security Awareness Month by going to www.staysafeonline.org