Re: Small business IT security

[krymson () gmail com]

Well, the problem with implementing anything is that those technicians will have to have access to both the systems of 
company A and their competitors. Unless someone is hired in-house or someone takes over in-house IT work that isn't 
above their heads, there's not much to be done there except trust those techs. I would spend some time and money to 
butter them up a bit. Maybe conversation and taking them out to eat is a bit much, but any time a holiday rolls around 
or sysadmin day or something just out of the blue happens that you give them a lot of work, go the extra mile and get 
them something to show your appreciation. Pay for their lunch if they're on site, or give them some gift certs 
somewhere or a tin of cookies or something. 

One thing you can do is to heavily encourage use of those servers, especially to store data. That way if a workstation 
is sent over to the pc repair shop, it won't actually have all that much data on it anyway.

You could make sure each PC is equipped with running and updated antivirus software. This should catch a lot of things 
that an amateur attacker might slip onto the system while it is in the shop, like a keylogger. You would need to make 
sure people know how to verify that it is running and updated, however. Or designate someone to do that walk-around.

Does someone in the office have a child who is into this sort of thing? Perhaps in exchange for playing on a nice 
system at a decent Internet connection at work on the weekends, he or she can do some minor work on the systems for 
relatively low pay?

Really though, security in a company larger than 10 can be difficult with no dedicated staff beyond simply supplying 
and repairing the hardware and other small things.

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