Categories: TECHNOLOGY

Dorm Room Security, Staying Safe While at College

Back to School, Securely

Fall is a beautiful time of the year. Starting the school year is an unfortunate side-effect. Here are some tips you can immediately put into action on keeping your information secure and keep doing them all through-out the semester. These tips will keep your information safe from prying eyes, and your stuff safe from dorm room pilfering.

Protect Your Computer. The basics: spyware, virus infection, firewall. Windows XP comes with a firewall that does a rudimentary job of protected privileged ports on your operating system. There are several free ones available that also do a great job (Sygate Personal Firewall, ZoneAlarm Free). Install it on your computer before you ever enter the campus. Keep in mind that a firewall can also prevent legitimate or necessary traffic from entering your system. Be sure to monitor your firewall’s logs for activity the first few days especially. You don’t want to block the campus’ DNS or DHCP network services – crippling your online access. Spyware is defeated mostly by being smart – don’t download or run anything that you don’t completely need and understand. Beware of desktop enhancements: those cute little programs running around your desktop with animations or showing you the weather may also be leaking your online network activity to questionable marketing firms. There are also several good anti-spyware programs (Windows Defender, Ad Aware Personal) available to help. Do not use any anti-spyware from an unknown source since many online ads are floating around now that remove some spyware while installing others. Virus protection is also a concern. There are also many products available from free to expensive. Free ones include Antivir Personal, Avast! Home Edition, AVG Free Edition. Check with the helpdesk or service center of your University to see if they have a site licensed version which will allow you to use a commercial product for free.

Protect Your Stuff. One word: Lockbox. They are actually not very expensive and can easily fit under the bed in your dorm room. You can keep everything personally valuable to you in them, not the least of which is important papers. You can also scan your important papers and put them on a USB thumb drive. Be certain you get one big enough to house your personal equipment such as Digital Cameras, Video Recorders, Audio Recorders, iPODs or other MP3 players.

Pick a Good Password. We all know you have 10 different email accounts and at least one is probably for your school not to mention all of the times your gone to a website and registered your email and given up yet another password. It is best to use a different password for every account. There is a very good way to keep them all separated. First of all pick two primary email accounts. The first is a primary account that you give out to family and good friends, this could easily be your University account. Second, find a free email account somewhere and give this out to everyone else, including online registrations and such. This account will get lots of spam. Register for email lists and such with only this second account. Next, pick a good password that you won’t forget that is at least 8 letters. Something like ‘rootbeer.’ Now let’s alter it a bit so that it isn’t a dictionary word: exchange the ‘o’ for ‘0’ and the ‘e’ for ‘3’ like so: r00tb33r. We don’t actually use this password, but this becomes the basis for all your other passwords. For example, let’s say you want to register an account with amazon.com. Use the password above and come up with a scheme for easily remembering your account password on every website. For our example, let’s say we take the first two letters of the primary domain name of the website: ‘AM’ and enter them in your password like so: r0A0tb3M3r. Feel free to come up with your own scheme. Another example is barnesandnoble.com: r0B0tb3A3r. They are difficult to type, but you don’t have to worry about forgetting them and you get a different password for almost every account. While on the subject of passwords, don’t forget to password protect your screen saver, be sure it locks after a reasonable amount of inactivity, like 10-15 minutes. This will keep most roommates out of your important data file.

Encrypt The Good Stuff. Most think that encryption is out of the hands of many users, but I’ve seen many products that help introduce the user to the fundamentals of encryption. Some use various modification of the over all theme. Examples include: Truecrypt.org which uses the idea of creating a virtual drive that is password protected and even hidden. Locknote.steganos.com takes the approach of encrypting one file that contains only your most important serial numbers, password and account information. PGP and GPG both encrypt using public/private key pairs and both can encrypt any numbers of files or drives. PGP has a personal version that is easy to use for $99.00 while GPG is free for personal use.

Take Advantage of Resources Available to You. Your University will probably offer many good services to take use. Expect to use your first few days getting to know these features and services such as high-speed access, free software, registering your laptop’s MAC address in case it is stolen as well as many educational seminars to acquaint you with the campus, key cards and meal plans. All of these are designed for ease of use and keeping your resources private. Get a backpack that can carry all your textbooks you’ll need for an entire day as well as anything you can’t bear to part with, like your iPOD, the thumb drive mentioned earlier, keys and personal identification cards. It is better to keep your term paper on your encrypted thumb drive than in your inbox floating around with your spam, encouraging notes form your family and mailing lists.

Be smart. Trust no one. Anytime you use your information think about who could be reading it. What is the purpose of collecting that information from you? A University official asking for your account number in the Bursar’s office to conduct a valid transaction that you expected is much different than signing up for an email list at a club desk in the hallway of the student union.

Loren Johnson (lmj_ou@yahoo.com)