£60k fine by Data Protection Agency

This week, a UK company, A4e, was fined £60,000 for falling foul of the Data Protection Action. An employee had their laptop stolen from their home and it contained a database of personal information. The company would have avoided a conviction if the data had been encrypted.

Contact us if you want some advice on this.

Alan Bullen

Managing Director

Lynx Networks

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Your cabling system could handle so much more

Did you know that your Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a or Cat7 cabling system can connect also connect VGA, audio and high definition TV at distances up to 90 metres? You just need an "extender" at each end. Contact Lynx Networks if you want more information.

The cost of running a server

It’s useful to know that a server using 400 watts of power would cost about £400 a year in electricity to run. You can use this when justifying the investment in virtual servers. Rather than having, say, six computers each acting as a server, you could have one or two computers running VM Ware, or equivalent, and your eight servers could be virtual. This could save £2,400 a year in electricity and help save the polar bears environment from global warming.

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Milton Keynes Environmental Symposium

Lynx Networks has a small stand at tomorrow’s Environmental Symposium at the Milton Keynes Hilton Conference Centre. We'll be promoting all of our services including our IT Support in Milton Keynes.  I’ll be there and it would be great to see you if you can make it. Go to http://www.mk-chamber.co.uk/ for more info.

How did we reduce our email traffic by 98%?

Last week we implemented Websense hosted anti-virus and filtering for our incoming email. By removing virtually all spam, this has reduced our inbound email traffic by an incredible 98%. This has given us more bandwidth for other applications and cut out the time previously wasted by all staff wading through junk emails.

We previously had a server dedicated to the task but it wasn't completely effective and was costing almost as much in just electricity as the new service is costing us in total.

It you would like to set up this service for you're own organisation, contact Lynx Networks.

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How Burma's internet was crippled

A cyber attack believed to have stated on 25^th Oct has crippled Burma’s internet. It’s a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from enslaved PCs all over the world. These are usually unprotected home PCs that would have been infected at any time but then left by the attackers in readiness to be triggered into action. The criminal attackers provide cyber attack services to clients at a cost.

It is speculated that the attack has been orchestrated by the Burmese government to prevent communications with the outside world during a rigged election.

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Blogging

Setting up and using a blog is dead easy. For example, this blog entry was created by sending an email to my blog (actually, this posting is just an excuse to test it). It’s just the content that can be challenging.

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