Let's Talk Computer Security

foreign I'm Jason Bitner CEO of triple helix Corporation and Welcome to our Helix Insider podcast today I'm joined in Studio by my two colleagues Sam Sheldon one of our senior developers and Sean cougar who is our Senior Systems engineer welcome everybody today we wanted to talk about computer security and in general um what is computer security Sean why don't you start us off uh computer security is the uh the the act of maintaining uh a safe environment for your your computers uh this could be ranging from your servers to your PCS um computers we store a whole bunch of personal information and pertinent information and information that needs to be secured on our PCS and we really need to keep those maintained and secure now computer security obviously from from your perspectives guys is that it's obviously very important especially in the work that we do and um we also maintain that computer security is actually a responsibility of both individuals and companies Sam why don't you give

me um your thoughts on on why it's important both from a personal and from a company perspective to maintain good security from a personal perspective like even outside of your work maintaining security is going to be important just for the just because there are things that you do not want people accessing on your computer you might store your passwords in a password manager on your computer you might store you might have your banking information your tax documents things like that very important to make sure that no that nobody can access those that you don't want to see them and on a company perspective it's basically the larger version of that your your workplace is going to have a lot of proprietary information they're going to have you know their confidential financial information you might have other people's confidential information on your network makes it very important both for you know keeping your company secure and also other people's companies secure I guess it would go

without saying too is that your individual security practices when you're working at a company impact the company because if you're not following good security it could actually create a leak right yeah you can if you if you fall for a phishing attack for load a malicious file you're opening up your work Network two attacks right very good point Sean what are your perspectives on that get on track if you're if you're working and you uh if you're uh follow your find yourself um vulnerable to any attack then you're definitely going to open up the the network for that and that's going to be the the entire internal Network for your your company not just your Edge Network where you may be intaking information yeah from your perspective um it impacts you directly because you're the guy that has to make sure everything's locked down for us right that's right I've got a um I've got a slew of firewalls to maintain and the slow networks to to maintain so uh we definitely need to get the uh get those

security policies just right so that only the information that needs to get out into the into the wild of the internet is getting out there bottom line is don't make your systems engineer angry got it exactly please don't Sam you touched on just a moment ago about uh passwords and good password Management in fact talking about a password manager talk to our guests about our visitors about what a password manager is and and why it's it's a great option for helping with maintaining security yeah so a password program whether it's school or one that's local to your machine which is preferred to store all of the passwords that you might use for different sites and keep them locked up under one master password with the idea that you only have to personally remember your master password and can then use much more complex passwords for all the different sites you might go to so like your banking information your email accounts your or in the case of your workplace um having your passwords for

you know different internal tools as well um it means that you can use much more complex difficult to crack passwords and it also helps you prevent password reuse if you only have to really remember that one master password that's an excellent point because um I know I'm guilty of this is that before we started using a password manager um you would tend to use that same password in all different locations and you've got to be very problematic that's a big danger point because it means that if any of the sites that you use that password on if they're comp if their passwords are compromised then even if they have good security you you could be open to if somebody manages to crack that password either on that site or elsewhere anything that uses it might be impacted by you know that password reuse oh that's an excellent point related to um physical device security and like your desktop computers um earlier in the internet I was aware of you know computer viruses and things like that and you

know we use software called antivirus to prevent uh computers from beginning infected into text a pattern or a file that might be infected and preventing it from running and whatnot but I've noticed a trend in the security World these days where you're not actually buying antivirus anymore you're actually now buying an entire Security Suite and the suite now includes antivirus anti-spam to prevent things coming in uh to your inbox on your email malware prevention so something that could potentially infect the computer but not actually visibly infected to the point where you knew something was going up like it's not damaging your computer but it's actually um it may be syncing underneath the under layer and actually stealing data and sending it somewhere so from that perspective you know we now buy these software security Suites and there's very very many of them out there just a perspective I'll pass this back to you Sean with security Suites what have you seen in your work about using

sweets and and do you recommend um using them and and why I definitely recommend using them one thing that not a lot of people know is that viruses malware and uh malicious software all three different things uh viruses tend to um infecting a computer in a way that's going to steal information malware thing tends to inspect a computer in a way that's going to either take control of it or use it as a node for a larger network of computers and we need to keep our our computers safe from those you can you can pop malware by just clicking on the wrong link and then all of a sudden your browser's downloaded a whole package that you may not be know is running on your on your PC and when that uh uh when it becomes active uh it could place your uh computer as a part of a botnet that's just attacking others right so safe to say these security Suites are put in place for the strict purposes of actually detecting an incoming threat and preventing it from infecting you correctly right and uh exactly

a lot of these uh antivirus and anti-malware software's are putting plugins and browsers now just to prevent you from going into malicious length uh that you may have happen and click on uh we all do make mistakes but it's important to be very very Vigilant when you're when you're opening your email and just when you're browsing the internet definitely yeah I get a lot of email that basically says uh warning uh accounts payable click here to see payment details Etc and it's so very innocuous yet very basic like very almost to the point of laughably simple but I mean because of that you know the tendency might be that oh I've got money coming in what is it clicking all of a sudden your payload has been released and so you're in trouble so you know a very good point you bring up um Sean Sam any perspectives on your end related to security software seats any personal stories you recall I don't know that I have any particular personal stories but um I was gonna ask your average user what level

of security software do you think it makes sense to have running on your PC it was actually a question that I was going to have because I know I'm not I'm guilty of kind of just relying on things like Windows Defender the built-in stuff I recommend uh personally antivirus anti-malware and anti-spyware a suite that Encompass all three uh spyware is becoming a big thing because there's a lot of uh a lot of these Bad actors on the internet they want to know uh what information you're passing out into the into the wild and so key loggers are a big thing though they'll they'll grab your password without ever having to brute force them it's because you've clicked on a bad link that's now monitoring your keyboard for every keystroke there's ransomware which that's a big problem for companies these days uh we saw last year or maybe been earlier this year uh the uh the colonial popcorn had uh had an issue with the with ransomware and they they went ahead and paid it in Bitcoin because that was

the only way to get it all these actors and the these programs are becoming more complex and more convoluted to deal with on a daily basis so uh these security Suites are essential in in maintaining our our distance from these Bad actors that's a good point and I'm glad you mentioned the key logger situation because keyloggers have been around for a very very long time and the idea behind them is that it just takes all of the keystrokes on the keyboard or what you're typing into like cut paste um and what the browser is getting from from you and actually then sending all of that those information uh directly to a third-party site offline and then they're actually taking all that information and they're literally everything you're typing everything you're writing is actually being sent somewhere for for someone to interrogate and potentially you know fund the user and even passwords inside of that so you know having a Security Suite is so very important to make sure things like that aren't

running underneath and the other thing about these Suites too I'm aware of is you want to make sure that you're scanning regularly on your computer they do do automated scans but sometimes those are a little bit more superficial it's recommended that you run the actual deep scan at least once a week if not more often if you if you're doing something more sensitive so all good feedback guys um Sean I wanted to talk to you now about you mentioned earlier about the edge security versus internal security could you give our listeners an idea of what that means and security versus internal security is um essentially your Edge is where you're able to connect to the internet um as a as a company as your internal Network connects out into the internet that's your Edge Gmail your any servers that you have on a demilitarized zone any port forwarding you have on your your your internal Network that has traffic coming in connecting to your IP addresses that's your Edge now any any traffic that's passing

along inside the uh the the network the network itself say you're uh at your workstation and you're connecting to the the server that's holding the the time clock that's an internal policy oh that's an internal connection and usually those uh can be less strict when it comes to firewall policies but you also want to segregate out where your employees are and what those employees can connect to as well you mentioned earlier just now like the dear militarized Zone and what what does that actually mean in terms of security uh let's let's take the term uh let's take a um a home network for example uh you'll have your your basic modem then you have your router built in both separate these personal residential routers are set up so any information coming in trying to connect to your IP address it's completely rejected unless you have any sort of port forwarding around but a demilitarized zone will expose one PC or a set of PCS on your uh Network to the internet itself so if they have information

coming in like a connection over Port 80 has made it's sent to that computer that's a demilitarized zone um I wanted to talk about you know we do a lot in our programming world with servers and our own machines that are in our remote offices and yet we still have to be efficient and I wanted to understand like what kind of security infrastructure go gets put in place to make sure if you're like a development team like us where you have to work on remote machines that we still are able to do our jobs and yet we're still maintaining good security for both our internal Network and our customers one of the main things about that is maintaining a uniform level of access across all the developers and maintaining images of that that access so that um when instances are spooled up so the development team can get started working on a project uh they already have all their permissions and all the necessary of access they need to get started with very little in front of them that they need to wait

on so the idea that um you restrict the access but not so much that it prevents them from doing their job correct exactly you want to do you want them to be able to get going relatively quickly with the with nothing that that's going to block them unless that's something specific to that project got it Sam any comments on related to the internal versus external network security that we've been talking about I feel like viewers often to work on something on say another company's you know if I'm working on something for another company I often have to log into their um VPN in order to actually access anything at all if I'm not on their VPN what's a VPN yeah so a VPN is a virtual private Network um and from from my perspective um in order to get access to you know a VPN all I have to do is open up a network client such as you know we often use net extender openvpn and things like that um all I have to do is log in with my credentials and then I am functionally on their Network and I think

Sean could probably speak more to the actual details of what goes on with that yeah a VPN is a powerful tool for uh for any um for any tech company who's managing their their Edge and internal networks what it allows it what it allows is a server sitting on a DMV that's connectable from the internet you'll log in using to that server using your virtual your VPN of clients such as net extender and what that will do is that will make an edge connection to their Network and allow you on to their internal Network because it that that server is running uh Dynamic host control vertical and handing out IP addresses for their poll to allow you to get internal uh to their Network yeah well this is obviously a lot of interesting perspectives on security we went over quite a bit today so uh what I'd like to do is I just like to you know wrap up with final comments and feedback and maybe I'll start with you Sam and I'll pass it off to Sean for final feedback so final comments on this I mean from my

perspective as a developer and someone who's not deeply involved in the security of you know either workplace you know or personal um password manager change your passwords on a regular basis use things don't reuse your passwords you know be vigilant about links you click emails you open everything in that vein got it Sean any final comments and thoughts about what our listeners should be thinking about for their their network security for their companies and for their personals one of the best things that I've always recommended for companies to do is to start moving away from a password system entirely and start using keys instead if you uh a lot of password managers these days you can you can uh encrypt your information with either a master password or a key or both and that key is just something you'll want to keep um very secure maybe on the cloud and in an encrypted file got it so a new way of kind of locking down your systems then yes yes uh it's it's not it's not but it's it's

definitely taking hold where you're you you won't use passwords as much as you will a passphrase that unlocks your key so uh keys are the way to go from my perspective okay well I think that's all the time we have for today I want to thank my two special guests Sam Sheldon and Sean coover for my team and this is the Helix Insider podcast thank you for listening until next time