The importance of the password cannot be over emphasised. As a company providing IT Support to Sussex and Surrey business Tamite actively encourages its’ customers to adopt sensible policies.

Tamite IT Support for Sussex business Is serious about its customers’ IT Security

A simple password on your PC user account is the first step. Ideally we would like it to be a little more complicated using uppercase numbers and non standard characters but a sensible password is better than no password, although 123456 and password are not.
Also make sure you don’t use the same password for everything. We always recommend to our IT support business customers that they don’t use the same password for their banking as for Social Networking, if your password for one account is hacked assume the worst and change all your passwords. Periodically change them anyway.
Good password policy shouldn’t be limited to your PC login and online accounts. Are you aware that your hardware such as your Router that supports your Broadband also has a username and password to login? It is vital that the password is changed from the default.
One of our customers found out why earlier this week when he couldn’t get access to his banking. Earlier in the week his Antivirus product detected an infection on one of the PCs on the network. Having successfully cleared it he thought his problems were at an end.

Passwords on your network infrastructure are also important

Our engineer was called in because the customer couldn’t access banking from any PC on the network. It turned out that the culprit was the Router which had been updated with some DNS settings that weren’t provided by the ISP but probably were linked to a fake DNS Server. DNS is like the telephone directory for the Internet turning domain names typed in, into IP address information that routes you to the correct destination. Or in the case or Fake DNS anywhere the criminals who planted the information wanted. It was probably as well the customer didn’t access his bank as the bank site he would have been routed to could well have been a dummy setup to collect banking credentials.

IT is our policy at Tamite IT Support for Sussex business that we always change default passwords on all kit. If the ISP who had updated this Router with new login details for the new Broadband had changed the default login on his popular brand of router the DNS couldn’t have been tampered with.

Want to know more about how Tamite IT Support are assisting Sussex business or how you can improve your companies or your own IT Security visit our website for details of one of our courses.

We are also doing an in-depth check of the customers’ network to make sure no other little nasties are left behind.