Simple Security Tips

A fireproof box can be a great place to store a small quantity of important papers. Anything put in this box has a better chance of surviving a fire. I like to keep my passports, birth certificates, wills, and social security cards in there, among other things. They are the things you don’t need all that often, but when you do need them, they can be almost impossible to replace.

There’s just one problem with my fireproof box; I don’t know what happened to the key. My five year old son liked to play with it, opening and closing it, and one day the key just disappeared. Now I’m sure that the key will turn up the next time I clean up my office — and thankfully there weren’t any important papers in it when he lost the key (I took them out before he decided to “decorate” my passport!) — but that does raise an important issue.

We buy those fireproof boxes so that our important papers will survive a fire. But what about the key? What good would it do if the box survived intact but you couldn’t put your hands on the key to unlock it?

I recommend that you keep one key with you (perhaps on your car key ring, since you’d probably grab that on the way out the door if there was a fire) and give the second key to somebody you trust (we call this “off site storage” in the security business). That way, should there be a fire (Heaven forbid!), there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to quickly open the box once it’s recovered.

I’ll be covering more fire tips in the days and weeks to come, so keep checking back.

Thanks,
Tom

The first message just popped into my Inbox: “Hurricane Relief”.

Here we go again.

If you want to contribute to hurricane relief, please do so via some established charity that you KNOW, with 100% certainty, will use your donation for its intended purpose. I’m not going to list any here, nor will I recommend any.

Why? Because even some established charities made appeals for donations after Hurricane Katrina three years ago, yet some donations that people thought were going to go to provide relief for hurricane victims were used for other purposes.

But whatever you do, PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO AN EMAIL REQUEST FOR CHARITY, DON’T MAKE DONATIONS BASED ON A WEB PAGE YOU SEE, AND DON’T ASSUME THAT SO-CALLED “HURRICANE SALES” WILL USE THE PROCEEDS FROM THE SALE TO HELP HURRICANE VICTIMS.

Serious. If you really want to give (which is a good thing to do), find a legitimate charity and give through them.

If there’s one thing we learned from Hurricane Katrina, it’s that some people will simply take advantage of a tragedy to make a few quick bucks. Don’t let it happen again.

And above all, NEVER CLICK ON A LINK in any “Hurricane Whatever” emails. They very well could lead you to a site that installs malicious code on your server.

Thanks,
Tom