I am turning in a new direction in this blog. Up to now, I have been writing to software architects and engineers. Apress has given me a contract to write a book called Personal Cybersecurity and I’ve just given a series of presentations on personal computer security at my local library. My previous two books, Cloud Standards and How Clouds Hold Together IT, are both aimed at enterprise software engineers. I hope Personal Cybersecurity will appeal to computer users in general, not just engineers. I gave the library presentations to see what happens when I talk to people who don’t speak engineer’s jargon. When I returned to my office after the last presentation, I was fretting about all the important things that I left out. For the next few blogs, I’ll write for the folks who attended my presentation–computer users who know how to use their devices but are not software engineers or developers. I’ll try to fill in some gaps in the presentation, and perhaps go farther.
For people who did not attend the presentations, but would like to read the PowerPoints, here are One, Two, and Three.
Create a local admin account tutorial
The first gap I want to fill is a step-by-step tutorial for setting up a local admin account on Windows 10. In the presentation, I warned that running as administrator all the time can make a hacker’s life easier by freely offering them administrator privileges. I forgot to mention that creating a local account in Windows 10 is like thrashing through a maze blindfolded with rocks in your shoes. The twists and turns are hard to follow. Here is a link to a PowerPoint tutorial that shows every step in Windows 10. Earlier Windows OSs make it less convoluted, but the steps are roughly the same. See the tutorial here.
Coming Soon
I am wincing over the meager advice I gave on detecting when a device has been hacked. It will take more than one blog to compensate. In the next blog, I plan to write about one of my favorite tools for spotting a hack beyond anti-virus: The Windows task list. I’ll try to keep the discussion simple, but the task list is an advanced and powerful tool and it does take some understanding of how computers work. It may take some extra effort to understand, but I think it will be worth it. Understanding the task list can help with more than just hacks.
But that is for next time.