OMG! What have we just Tweeted?

There are risks to businesses using social media, as we discuss on the courses I give. In case you were in any doubt about this then you may like to know that US Airways, one of the largest airlines in the US with 420,000 Twitter followers have just accidentally Tweeted a photo of a naked woman. Apparently they were responding to a customer enquiry and were trying to flag the image as inappropriate but managed to tweet the picture instead. Exactly how they managed to do such a thing is not clear but I guess someone in their social media team may be taking a trip down the job center soon! You can read more about this embarrassing incident here.

Don't forget!
Check all your tweet, status updates etc. carefully before you hit the 'go'button. If someone sends you inappropriate material its probably best just to delete it and block their account.

Reset all your passwords?

If you have attended any of our courses you will know we always include a section on security and a discussion about passwords. You may also of heard that in the last few days concerns have been expressed about the so called 'Heartbleed bug'. See the article on the BBC web site here
So, do you need to reset all your passwords? The article isn't really clear about this but high risk passwords such as those you use for Internet Banking might need to be changed. The article also contains some useful advice about choosing passwords although it does not give much advice about how to remember them all apart from using a secure password vault (this is the method I use - a password protected Word Document on a USB memory stick).

Don't forget:

• Keep a backup of all your work! - on a USB device which you don't leave attached to your PC.
• Don't use all the same password for every account
• Use strong passwords, longer the better, use a combination of letters, symbols and numbers
• Check you internet bank statement regularly for odd activity - hackers sometime test an account by withdrawing a small amount before they start helping themselves to larger amounts.
• Watch out for suspicious emails.

Update!

Useful ideas on how to remember a random password can be found in this BBC News web site article