Best Practices for safe Computing Enviornment

As a best practice please take the following steps to lessen the risk to [Your Company]'s computing environment (these apply to the work and home computing environments):
 
1.  If you DO NOT know the sender of an email or the content appears suspicious, do not respond and do not open it as it legitimizes your email address and presents greater risk.  Your email address then becomes a target and/or can then be used to send virus's or fraudulent material elsewhere and it will appear that they came from [Your Company].  Delete the email and do not open any attachments.
 
2.  If you receive an automated phone call that seems suspicious that requests you to respond to it and leads you to believe in doing so, you will win a prize - DO NOT follow the instructions.  Instead, hang up or delete the voice message.  Again, should you respond, you will likely receive a phone charge and your number will be added to a list or sold to other fraudulent organizations.  Not all are fraudulent in nature, however if your phone number is not publicly available (i.e. work cell number), then there is significant increased risk that it is a fraud.
 
3.  Portable storage devices are not secure and present risk.  Corporate data is the property of the [Your Company] and your due diligence in the storage and safe transport of that data is crucial. 
 
4.  Do not store corporate data on your personal drive on a workstation as it is not backed up and if the computer is stolen the data is at risk of theft and misuse.  Should you need to store data on a laptop, ensure it is also stored on your M drive so there is a company copy and backup.  As a security requirement and best practice, [Your Company]  will be looking to encrypt the data that is stored on laptops and providing further information on the best practices for mobile data storage devices.  This will protect a further level of protection beyond your ID and password in the event that a device is lost.
 
4.  Only log into corporate email or the [Your Company] environment from "trusted locations" and secure sites where you know that the proper level of data security and anti-virus protection is in place.  Consumer based email systems present a high risk to corporations.  Do not access your personal email accounts (i.e.. Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.) from your work email.