Internet Connections - How to Really Mess up Your Brokerage!!!

October 2002

Despite our warnings and reports of horror stories in the past, brokerages continue to hook up to the Internet and face disaster. If there is anyone left that still wants to learn the hard way, here are seven tips that will guarantee excitement!
 

1.	Install Internet in your office. For extreme danger, install high-speed Internet so you can be damaged even faster.
2.	Adopt the attitude - "Aw shucks, it'll NEVER happen to me!".
3.	Do not install any firewall. You want hackers to get into your systems as much as possible. Why put something in to stop them?
4.	Don't bother turning on an intrusion detector on your server. You can get more stress by not knowing for sure if someone is breaking into your server. More details on intrusion detection to follow in a following CIM-Sphere issue.
5.	Make sure your Anti-Virus software is old and out-of-date, or for even more excitement, turn it off completely. Don't forget to check ALL your workstations. For maximum disruption, you will want all your machines to get infected!
6.	Make sure you encourage all your users to open all email attachments. For instant gratification, gather everyone around to watch and open emails with subjects like "This spam is not from Eastern Europe".
7.	Recommend that users install all sorts of free downloadable software, screen savers, and stuff like that. Some of these are really good at choking Windows systems and who knows, you might get lucky and download a Trojan that lets a hacker capture your passwords when you are on the Internet doing banking or something else that's fun.