Not without my IT habits

Deal­ing with IT is part of daily busi­ness. It is there­fore not sur­pris­ing that in the course of time cer­tain IT habits creep in with every user. But most peo­ple for­get that these behav­iour pat­terns can have many bad con­se­quences in the long run. This may be because of the con­ve­nience, but also because of igno­rance, which makes users care­less with IT until some­thing bad hap­pens.

The fol­low­ing is a list of most IT habits, their con­se­quences and what solu­tions are avail­able to solve the prob­lem. Every­one ben­e­fits from a quick acclima­ti­za­tion of the behav­iour pat­terns.

A pass­word rarely comes alone

Who is not proud of the fact that their own pass­word meets all guide­lines to be more secure from attack­ers and hack­ers? Finally, cre­ativ­ity is needed to cre­ate a pass­word that is suf­fi­ciently long and con­tains upper and lower-​case let­ters, but also spe­cial char­ac­ters and num­bers. Any­one who has achieved this is usu­ally proud of him­self and at the same time thinks that this would be enough to pro­tect all e-​mail accounts, bank accounts, online office tools and online shop­ping sites. But every user who only uses one pass­word is wrong and puts his devices and him­self in dan­ger. Because with only one pass­word, iden­tity thieves have it very easy to break through the fire­wall and have access to all data. Vari­a­tion of pass­words is the key to more secu­rity.

Eat­ing and drink­ing on your lap­top

It may be tempt­ing to take food to your lap­top. Whether it’s at work or at home. The lap­top comes into con­tact with food more often than it should. Even if many thinks that noth­ing will hap­pen, unfor­tu­nately it hap­pened faster than most peo­ple can see. In just a few mil­lisec­onds, crumbs, sauce stains, ingre­di­ents or even whole drinks get onto the key­board. Every­one knows that elec­tron­ics and liq­uid are not com­pat­i­ble, but nev­er­the­less less atten­tion is paid when using the com­puter. Liq­uid can do great dam­age and spoil the entire hard disk in a very short time. From non-​functioning key­boards to faulty main­boards to short cir­cuits. To pre­vent this, food of any kind should be kept away from elec­tronic hard­ware.

Non-​existent back­ups

If it is not you, then an acquain­tance or some­one from the com­pany does not make back­ups. Every­one knows at least one per­son who does not back up the data reg­u­larly and thus runs the risk of data loss. After all, a hard disk is not immor­tal, so sooner or later the good part and all the data will go with it. Of course, reg­u­lar back­ups are not one of your employ­ment pref­er­ences, but it is unavoid­able to back up the data reg­u­larly or, in the best case, to store it addi­tion­ally on an exter­nal hard disk before a total loss occurs.

Switch off the com­puter at the push of a but­ton

Who rec­og­nizes the state­ment that many users switch off the com­puter as soon as they no longer need it by press­ing the switch-​off but­ton? But what many do not know is that by press­ing a but­ton, the com­puter is sim­ply put into sleep mode and thus con­tin­ues to con­sume energy. Fur­ther­more, this sleep mode means that the com­puter does not reboot reg­u­larly. How­ever, if the switch-​off but­ton can­not be omit­ted in the future either, the func­tion of switch­ing off the device at the push of a but­ton should be adapted. This is done under Con­trol Panel – Energy Options. Con­se­quently, the action “Selec­tion of what should hap­pen when power switches are pressed” is located on the left. Under this point you can select “Go down” directly for switch­ing off by press­ing the but­ton.

Pro­tect pass­words cor­rectly

For more secu­rity, there are sev­eral sophis­ti­cated pass­words that com­ply with the guide­lines. Every­one who heeds and imple­ments this advice sup­ports their own safety. But fid­dling out numer­ous dif­fer­ent pass­words usu­ally means that not all pass­words can be remem­bered, espe­cially when using numer­ous web­sites. There is only one thing to do: Save all pass­words in your own soft­ware in an unse­cured doc­u­ment, as an Out­look note or on your mobile phone. Of course not! Many may imple­ment it this way, but at the same time they are in dan­ger because the pass­words are not pro­tected in this way. To pro­tect pass­words securely, pro­grams such as “KeeP­ass” should be used for pass­word man­age­ment, which encrypt the entire data­base.

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