Cyber Security for ordinary businesses

In this day and age, every thing your company does is on the company computers somewhere.  Email is forever.  First off, you need to identify the things that you need to keep secret from hackers and competitors.  Start with personnel records.  Those must be secret to keep competitors from pirating your best people.  Pay and salary is particularly sensitive because when that gets out, everyone in your company gets bad feelings about everyone who make more than they do.  And it points headhunters toward your less well paid people.  Production information; mechanical drawings, electrical schematics, parts lists, software source code, test procedures, recipes and formulas.  With this stuff someone can set up to make your product and compete with you.  That's legal in places like China.  At the very least they can make a good guess at your cost of production.  Sales and marketing; your customer lists and customer contact information.  If the competition gets to your customers and wins them over, you are hurting.  Email; there is bound to be damaging information in someone's email.
    To keep the hackers out, first consider keeping stuff OFF the hard drives.  Back it up to CD-ROM and keep the CD's in a locked room.  There is a lot of old stuff on hard drive that you don't use today, but could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.  If the stuff is really valuable, now is the time to establish an off site backup location.
    Set up a secure network.  This is a small number of computers, kept in locked rooms,  and NOT connected to the general company network or the public internet, or the public phone network.  By not connected we means NO wires or wireless connections to anywhere.  Don't rely on "firewalls", some of them have caught fire in the past.  Snip off the wires going to the USB sockets to prevent Flash drive virus invasion.  Remove all floppy drives to prevent invasion by merely inserting a boot floppy in the "A:" drive. Keep all your sensitive stuff on the secure network.  When you do Engineering Change Orders, pull the master drawing off the secure network, give it to the engineer, and have him return the updated version to the secure network.
   Now we come to training your personnel.  Start with email.  Make sure everyone understands that email lasts forever, and will be used against you in court, and by hackers.  Tell them to never put anything in email that they would not post on the bulletin board at the local super market.  If the matter is sensitive, handle it face to face or over the phone.  And delete old emails after 30 days.
   You want to run an anti virus scan once a week on every computer in the company.  Virii can do the damnedest things, just ask the Iranians about Stuxnet.  Commercial virus scan programs are pretty good, and they get better every week.  Keep your anti virus updated.  Even if you have a deal that permits IT to run the virus scans remotely, you still want everyone to understand how important they are.
   All your creative people want to keep their stuff on their machines, just in case.  Encourage them to encrypt it, and/or back it up to CD and keep it  in a locked drawer.  And make sure the latest version is stored on the secure network as well as on their private hard drives. 
   Consider getting rid of Windows company wide.  It can be done.  Linux works, and isn't too difficult for your people to learn.  Windows is totally, but totally, insecure.  Anything stored on a Windows computer is vulnerable to small children, let alone adult hackers.

Words of the Weasel : Establishment

We have a Republican establishment, and a Democratic establishment.  Up until very lately, the establishment was the parties elected officials, and appointed office holders, people whose day jobs were politics or politicking.   
   Lately, fringe groups in either party have been using "establishment" as an epithet for people who don't share their politics.  This may be true, the establishment is concerned with getting re-elected, making deals, and as a rule is much less ideological than the fringe groups.
   But we are always going to have an establishment, meaning the office holding political professionals.  Get used to it, someone has to do it.  And most of these people are trying to get something done, and they all learn that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. 

Could The Donald beat The Bern?

Who knows right now?  And New Hampshire doesn't decide the nominations, but a smashing win in New Hampshire certainly makes a good start to winning the nomination.  It surely gains you lots of media attention.  I haven't seen any polls on a Trump-Sanders matchup.  The few I have seen of a Trump Hillary matchup were not good, the polls had Hillary beating the Donald by a slim margin.  Not that polls mean all that much this early. 
   This ought to be a Republican year.  Obama has been wreaking the US economy for 7 years now, and he has thrown a bunch a people out of work, lowered everyone's earnings.  If the US voters have any sense left, they will vote for a Republican this time.  If the Republicans can nominate a decent candidate.  Trouble with Trump is his very high negatives.  Gallup says 60% of voters don't like Trump.  That's scary.
    Will the Bern's free stuff be enough to win over The Donald?
    Could the #2 finisher, Kasich, be a better candidate for the GOP?

Obama does an Op-Ed in the WSJ

Nice big half a page with am illustration Op Ed piece.  "Protecting US Innovation From Cyberthreats". Sound great.  Only trouble is, the Op-Ed contains zilch about protecting anything.  Lotta nice empty words, typical Obama speak, but nothing of substance.  He does promise to spend money,  $19 billion on the "Cyber Security National Action Plan" what ever that might be.  And another $3 billion on federal IT.  And a new bureaucrat,  the Chief Information Security Officer, salary unspecified.  And another unfunded effort to "build a corps of cyber professionals" to "push best practices at every level".   And a new "cyber security Center of Excellence".  And a new "bipartisan Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity".
   Does anyone really think adding more bureaucrats, more funding, and more bureaucracy is gonna keep the hackers out?
   The real situation is this.  Any computer connected to the public internet or the public phone system is vulnerable to invasion and plundering.  Windows computers are ten time more  vulnerable than any other sort of computer.  We must never store valuable information on computers connected to the public internet.  And we should never store valuable information on any sort of Windows computer. They are like Swiss cheese, full of holes.  If we made this nation wide policy we would be a helova lot more secure than we are now.
   Obama doesn't understand any of this.  In fact I doubt that Obama knows how to boot up his laptop. 

I just voted in the NH primary

Turnout is heavy.  Down at Franconia town hall, the parking lot is full.  I've been doing elections at town hall for quite a few years and that's as busy as I have ever seen things.  I voted at mid morning, in between the vote-on-the-way-to-work rush and the vote-over-lunch-hour  rush.  Secretary of State's office is predicting a heavy turnout, and I think they have it right. 
  The Republican ballot had 30 names on it. Half of 'em I've never heard of.  

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

Well, we got an inch and a half.  Disappointing, especially as the weatherweasels had forecast 3 to 5 inches. It's cold, 20 F so they can make snow. 

If it can orbit a satellite it can put a warhead anywhere on Earth

The NORKs just launched an Earth satellite.  If your rocket has the delta V to achieve orbit, it can put that "satellite" anywhere on Earth.  I haven't heard just how heavy the NORK satellite was, but it's a start.  A helova start.  To have an ICBM, the payload has to be enough to carry a nuke.  We think, we don't know for sure, that the NORK nukes are "first generation" i.e. heavy, weighing a matter of tons.  Back in the fifties, when both we and the Soviets were getting into the ICBM business, the war heads would be first generation and be very heavy.  The Americans decided that the necessary rocket to hoist a first generation nuke would be ridiculously huge and so we didn't get  seriously to work on a missile until the later generation of nukes came along with weights down into the 100 pound area.  The Soviets wanted a missile so badly that they set to work to build the ridiculously huge rocket.  That rocket came on line about 1957. launched the first Sputnik, and did all the Soviet space launches for the entire Cold War.  We didn't come up with anything to match it until Saturn 5 in 1968.