WAYNESBORO- This is Part 5 of a 6 part interview by Samantha Wolfe of the Law Offices of Samantha K. Wolfe LLC, with Cermak Technologies, Inc. owner Mike Cermak, Jr. The interview is lightly edited.
Sam: I have noticed when I logon onto Wi-Fi, my computer will ask if this is my home network or is this a public network. It does it on my phone and on my computer. Tell me why that is important.
Mike: When your computer connects to a network, by default it wants to announce that it is there and see who else is there. That is very useful if you are at your office or at home because you may have a printer, scanner, TV, or some other device on your network that you want to have interact with your computer. Typically, you want to be able to trust those devices and start talking to them.
However, if you are at Starbucks or the airport or another public venue, you don’t want to make yourself known to people like me who might be able to see your computer. They could potentially start interacting with your computer without you knowing it.
So, that is why your computer asks if it is connecting to a public network or private network. It is important to choose the right one. If you go home and accidentally choose a public network instead of a private network, it sometimes becomes difficult to communicate with some of those home or office devices. Sometimes printers won’t talk to your computer if that extra firewall on your computer is blocking them.
Sam: What I am realizing from talking to clients is that I think it is inevitable that a website that we are using is going to be hacked. So, if we can limit the exposure that is what we really need to be focusing on because I think the reality is everybody is going to be hacked at some point.
Mike: There is no doubt about it. There is a website called ‘haveibeenpwned.com.’ It has a place where you can type in your email address.
I am going to type mine in right now, and it lists all the websites that they know about (and of course there are others), but all the websites that they know about where my email address and password for that website have been leaked.
I just typed in my email address, and it tells me Adobe, Dropbox, and a whole list of them. For each, there is a description. So, for Myspace, there is a description: in 2008, Myspace suffered a data breach of 360 million accounts. My email address and password was found in one of those data breaches.
You are right; it is not whether your password will be compromised, but when. It isn’t like I did anything wrong. It isn’t my fault Myspace got hacked, but now my password, whatever I used for Myspace in 2008, is out on the web. If I am still using that same password somewhere, that puts me at a lot of risk.
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See part 6 of this interview in tomorrow’s edition. If you have technical questions you would like to ask, email [email protected] with the title “Ask the Tech Guy”. Mike will respond to your questions in the Voices section of LocalNews1.org.
Mike Cermak is President of Cermak Technologies Inc, with offices at 46 South Potomac Street in Waynesboro and 201 Prospect Avenue in Hagerstown. For over 20 years, Cermak has managed computers and networks for businesses in Franklin County, PA and Washington County, MD. They specialize in IT services for small businesses, including computer service, system management, business phone systems, surveillance cameras, and website development. Cermak Technologies can be reached at (717) 762-8234, 1-888-4-CERMAK, or [email protected].
Samantha Wolfe is an attorney in Waynesboro PA, located at 20 East Sixth Street, Suite 206, Waynesboro PA 17268. She can be contacted at 717-655-2676, or through her website, www.skwlawoffice.com
