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State of INFOCOM September 2013

Greeting Marines,
I just returned home yesterday from a long weekend in Daytona Beach at the 15th annual Klingon Feast. It was a great event this year and a good time was had by all. One word of advice, if you ever attend a Klingon Feast remember they don’t use utensils. Talk about all hands on deck.

I would like take a few minutes and talk about passwords. We have all gotten those emails from folks we know where the Subject says “check this out” and it has a weird link to a website in the email. We see these a lot over the email lists we subscribe to. This happens when someone’s email account is compromised and spam is sent to all the contacts they have in their contact list.
Nine out of ten times the account is compromised because of a weak password. I have added a few tips on setting a stronger password and things you should avoid. A strong password should be longer than eight characters and complex. Include a combination of at least three (3) upper and/or lowercase letters, punctuation, symbols, and numerals. The more variety of characters in your password, the better and by all means never use the same password for everything. You want to avoid using Dictionary words in any language. Words spelled backwards, common misspellings, and abbreviations. Common letter-to-symbol conversions, such as changing “and” to “&” or “to” to “2”. Sequences or repeated characters. Examples: 12345678, 222222, abcdefg, or adjacent letters on your keyboard like (qwerty). Personal information that could be guessed or easily discovered. Your name, birthday, driver’s license number, passport number, or similar information. You may want to consider a password keeper program. There are several to choose from. Some are free and some are not free. Many of these programs have random password generators where you can set the length and complexity of the password when it is created. Lastly, you want to change your password often. I usually change my important passwords every 90 days. It can be said weak passwords are like locking your car, it only keep the honest people out.
Ok, enough about password security. Earlier this month we added the new MOS manual to the SFMC website, I hope you have had a chance to check out the new manual.
I have been working with computer ops to get some of the email problems with the reports worked out. We have made some correction but we are still addressing a few outstanding issues. I hope we can get these issues resolved in the near future. I will keep you posted on our progress and will be following up on some of the correction we have made.
In closing here are the pingdom stats for September.
September
Uptime: 100%
Outages: 0
Downtime 0
Response time: 522 ms
Thank you,
BGEN Mark “Slayer” Anderson
Commanding Officer, Information Command (COINFOCOM)
STARFLEET Marine Corps]]>