Almost all Wintel & Macintosh clients are, by design, insecure. They are frequently configured to log in automatically as a privileged user, so whomever is at the keyboard has full reign over the entire system. Thus, physical security is paramount to protect your client systems.

Store your data on a network server

By storing your data on a network server, your data files are then protected by the server's security system. This also means that your files are "backed up" by the network administrator's backup schedule, who can then recover your files in event of theft, accident, or program error.

Log out of the server when you leave

For "ease of use", many client systems only require you to authenticate once to the network server(s), caching your password as long as the client system is turned on. While this is convenient, it means that someone can come in, access your computer, and thus access the network server as your account. This may compromise not just the one client account/computer, but other user's files on the server. Thus, be sure to "lock" the computer when you step out of the office, and "log out" of the computer at the end of each work session.

Check your computer for virii and malware

Computer virii (or viruses) can be transmitted via floppy disks, MS-Word documents, email attachments, or from programs downloaded from the Web. Your client machine should run some virus-checker, such as McAfee, on system startup. You may also wsih to run checks for software silently downloaded from web sites using Ad-aware and Spybot Search and Destroy

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Last updated: Aug 03, 2004 (02:14:33 PM EDT)
URL: http://www.clasnet.ufl.edu/security/client.shtml