Security

Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – February 2017

Thank you to everyone who attended our first meeting of the new year at Grow Pittsburgh, and a big thank you to Rebekah and the Grow Pittsburgh team for hosting us!

Our next meetup will take place at the same location on Wednesday, March 1 from 8:30-10 am.

Here are the notes and resources from the meeting:

Affordable wi-fi hotspots available from Mobile Citizen, a division of Sprint

  • Up to 10 people can connect to it
  • 25 MB encryption
  • Available to any nonprofit or household
  • You pay for the Franklin R450 hotspot (~$79 + $9 shipping), then $120 for a year of service
  • Visit MobileCitizen.com and submit NPO information
  • Have to re-certify annually
  • Coverage is anywhere Sprint has coverage (Sprint owns most of the cellphone infrastructure in the U.S.)
  • Cannot tether with it
  • Tech support is reportedly very good
  • If you have questions, email Dave Sevick at Computer Reach, info@computerreach.org
  • Cradlepoint – can plug old Verizon connectivity stick into it; will act like a landline router

Salesforce Resources

Training users

  • Tell them how to do it
  • Show them how to do it
  • Have them do it

Security

  • Ransomware – story about Italian hotel computer system held for ransom by hackers
  • What are nonprofits doing about cryptoware and ransomware?
  • Education is important – educating your staff and volunteers not to fall for scams in emails
  • AV software only does so much good to guard against this
  • Don Rowe and his colleagues are working on a few scripts to help guard against this (for example, one script would unmount the hard drive so it couldn’t be hijacked)
  • Most NPOs don’t seem to be creating disaster recovery plans – we need to get better about this
  • It’s important to check your ability to restore backups on a regular basis
  • Crashplan – online data backup
  • If ransomware were to take over your computer, the best thing you can do is shut it down, disconnect from the Internet and call someone for help
  • Software tools
  • A small office needs, at a minimum:
    • Firewall
    • Spam filtering appliance
    • Antivirus
    • Anti-malware
  • Management will always make the argument of convenience vs. risk – IT is sometimes forced into poor practices (If you are an IT worker in this boat, document everything to CYA)

Password management

Steel City Codefest event, 1st week in April 2017

  • NPOs or government agencies can submit a challenge to be worked on during the event
  • Deadline to submit is Valentine’s Day
  • Developer groups/teams can also sign up
  • Visit the website to submit a challenge