One of the biggest responsibilities for our IT consulting company near Boston is keeping IT networks secure. Whether it’s a few PCs or hundreds on your IT network, there’s one thing that can separate your system from being compromised: a great password.

Why? Hackers want access to anything and everything. If they can guess your user name and password, you might as well have given them your wallet and the keys to your building.

Before we talk about what makes a good password, let’s begin with the first of five things to know and practice in using passwords.

1. Don’t be complacent: Attacks can and do happen.

Hackers are a devious bunch and will stop at nothing to get into your network and files. They use three different methods to get to you: brute force, dictionary attacks, and social engineering. (more…)

Via ars technica:

“AT&T today rolled out major change to its DSL terms of service, notifying its customers of new data caps, network management rules, and usage metering tools. Judging by company forums, many users aren’t pleased, but they had better keep their anger in check. The new terms of service also allow AT&T to cut off subscribers “who repeatedly harass or abuse our employees.”

The data caps are official: 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB per month for fiber-to-the-node U-Verse subscribers. Repeated overages will result in a $10-per-50GB charge. The caps begin May 2…” more here

For the team here at Internet & Telephone, it’s been a long week of take-out food, bag lunches and leftover doughnuts (don’t you judge me).  Our resident Virus/Security Expert, and team nominee for first-round canonization, Chef Michael Jordan has been away attending training courses.

And while these courses doubtless serve to make him a better engineer, they do little to fill our bellies.

Glad to have you back, Chef MJ!

One of the defining cultural characteristics of Internet & Telephone is our focus on Professional Development.  In order to deliver first class service to our customers, it is critically important that our Engineers remain at the forefront of the latest technology.  We also know that in order to retain the best and brightest talent, our company must align itself with the personal career goals of our employee.  The contribution has to go both ways:  Our employees drive our success, and we give them the tools to do so.

So when our lead Microsoft Engineer, John Gagnon, traveled to California last week to attend a Cisco bootcamp, our whole team was pulling for him.  It’s considered extremely rare for an Engineer to attend a week-long bootcamp, absorb an entire week’s worth of information, and then successfully pass the Certification exam all in the same stint. In fact, it’s considered so rare that the boot camp instructor virtually guaranteed that nobody from the class would be able to do it. But guess what – he was wrong!

And the whole team was waiting to celebrate when John returned victorious, with his Cisco Certified Network Associate’s cert in hand! Break out the cake and beer!