Young employees are a bigger IT risk
March 18, 2008
“…younger workers will use your corporate network to run most any device, technology or social networking software they can get their hands on. Dubbed “Millenials,” these workers born after 1980 are nearly twice as likely to use cell phones and PDAs at work, and half admit to installing unauthorized software on their employer’s computers. On the upside, the Millenials are more security aware than their older co-workers.”
When they’re not causing security risks by updating their MySpace profiles during lunch breaks and downloading music, chat applications, and a host of other bits of media content that have traditionally served as vectors for malware and viruses, that is.
That’s what makes IT such a challenging field — you have to be smarter than the other users, and stay one step ahead of the craftiest cube-dweller. People will use proxies to get around firewalls, so you have to be able to identify and block proxies. People will try and use chat programs, reach Facebook, download games, watch videos, update their iPods, and so forth. To say nothing of the hosts of malicious programs that can get in by any number of means, even email.
It’s a challenge, to say the least.
Leave Your Cell at Home Day
February 25, 2008
That’s the challenge my wife has given her readers for tomorrow: leave the mobile phone (and/or iPod, and/or Blackberry, and/or PDA) at home, just for one day, to see if it really kills you (or not).
Sweetie: I’ll take that challenge.
Everyone else: I dare you.
