General Best Practices for Secure Computing
General Best Practices for secure computing
There are a number of steps you can take to protect your computer and data from harm or intrusion.
- Use good password-sense
- Force the use of passwords on computers used to access Rice resources, both in the office and at home
- Choose a good, hard to guess password
- Don't share your password
- Ensure that your computer is safe - includes computers that connect to Rice from office and at home
- Apply security patches as they become available automatically.
- Run an antivirus program and update it daily.
- Use a personal firewall.
- Secure your laptop with encryption or other tools that prevent hackers from accessing the data on your computer.
- Leave data on the server
- As much as possible, do not copy sensitive information to your desktop, laptop or portable device.
- Work from the server copy of documents containing sensitive data.
- Remove all data from all devices (computers, PDAs, cell phones, etc) before they are transferred to another user or department, sold, or otherwise disposed of.
- Many of the cases of data theft occurs from systems that are sold or transferred before they are cleaned of private and confidential data.
- Rice's Information Security Officer has provided guidelines for safe computer equipment disposal at Rice
- Use secure connections to access resources
- Rice University uses secure connections for many of the most commonly used network applications (Email, web, calendar, etc).
- Rice also provides VPN access to securely connect to the Rice network while at home or away.
- Report incidents - from stolen devices (Laptops, PDAs, etc) to suspected network break-ins immediately
- The quicker we know about an incident the quicker we can respond, potentially limiting any damage.