Being the undisputed master of all things IT, I get a lot of questions about security. It seems that a lot of people are worried about various nefarious hacker types (hereinafter referred to as “bad monkeys”) breaking into their system and doing dastardly deeds, like sending spam or deleting all of those funny pictures of cats fixing servers.
Because my knowledge of IT and system security is so vast, and my understanding of the dark and twisted minds of bad monkeys is so deep, I could write a book on the subject of computer security. I won’t. But I sure could, you bet yer sweet bippy, I could.
Instead, I’m going to provide for you, absolutely free of charge, a timeless and unbeatable security plan in the form of a bulleted list:
- Update your system and all software that runs on it, every day or so. This is easy on a good OS that has good package management, like apt-get or yum. You can even set it to happen automatically. If you don’t have a well-supported OS that is easy to update, replacing it with one that is would be step one.
- Turn off unneeded services. If you aren’t sure what it does, find out. Google knows. If you don’t use it, turn it off.
- Use strong passwords. Your birthday is not a strong password. Your name is not a strong password. Your dog’s name is not a strong password. Any one of the passwords on this list, or this one, or this one, are not strong passwords. A strong password is one that is eight or more characters in length, has letters and either numbers or symbols or both, and is not based on a dictionary word.
That’s it. You’re done. Your system is secure, forever and ever, amen. Now you don’t need to ask me about securing your server anymore. As long as you write secure code to run on it, you can rest easy knowing that the bad monkeys will be flinging their poop around on some other poor slobs server.
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