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Last week I was complaining that I had lost my mojo. I just could not stay focused on anything but now I am happy to say that it is back and I’m back in the work groove.

I did all sorts of things to try and get back to focusing on work but nothing was happening. It wasn’t until I had to take an overnight trip down to the state capital that took me out of the office and out of the home office and away from the computer that things settled down.

So if you have lost your focus and you’re struggling to get it back then get up and walk away from your computer for a while. It’s obviously the last thing you want to do when you’re struggling to get your work done but it works.

Are you wearing protection?
No, I’m not talking about that sort of protection. I’m talking about your computer, how protected is that from all the nasty stuff that is out there on the Web?

Hopefully at the very least you’ve got an anti-virus program installed but please don’t tell me that you’re only running a free version. Free versions are OK for people who aren’t trying to run a business from their computer but if you rely on your computer for your income it’s time to invest in some of the better paid anti-virus programs.

I’ve used Kaspersky for years and really can’t speak highly enough of it. Kaspersky has kept our PCs and laptops free of nasties even and those nasties are lurking just about everywhere these days. If you’re still thinking that you never visit any sites where you could pick those up then you’re still back in the dark ages.

These days you can pick up crap just about anywhere; even banking websites have been known to drop some garbage on the computers of people who have gone there to do their banking. No site is immune from hackers who inject malicious scripts into those sites and if your computer is still wearing a free condom then good luck … I hope you don’t lose too much valuable time cleaning that junk out of your computer when you get hit.

But anti-virus software just isn’t enough!

You need to do more
If you’re relying solely on anti-virus software to keep you safe then you’re still up to 50 per cent exposed because at least 30 to 50 per cent of all attacks come from malware that traditional anti-virus software does not pick up … and tucked inside that malware are some very nasty things.

So take a look at something like Malwarebytes if you want to increase your chances of keeping all that shit out of your computer. But even that may not be enough to keep you safe.

Just this week I read a recommendation that a computer security expert offered when interviewed about computer security. He suggested that in these days of stronger and stronger crypto-locker type programs that lock up your computer and then hold your data to ransom the best way to stay safe was not to keep your important data on your computer at all.

That resonated with what I have been thinking for some time now. We all keep all our important files on our computer hard drives and we’re encouraged to do that by hard drive manufacturers who are producing bigger and bigger hard drives.

We keep our financial information on our computer’s hard drive, we keep our business files on our computer’s hard drive, we keep (or should keep) backups of all our websites on our computer’s hard drive … so what happens when we download something that has some piece of ransomware hiding in it?

Basically you’re screwed because, even if you are silly enough to pay the ransom, there is no guarantee that our files will be unlocked and without them our business takes a monstrous hit that we may never recover from.

So lately both my partner and I have been transferring most of our files from our computers’ hard drives to portable hard drives that we only plug in when we need the information contained on a particular drive … and of course we keep those backed up as well.

It is not as convenient as being able to keep everything on our computer’s hard drive but when we compared convenience with what we could lose if the worst happened the need for convenience suddenly became a lot less important.

So if you haven’t thought about how secure you and your online business is lately then now is the time to do a security review and do something about protecting yourself because you never know when the worst possible thing could happen.