Rotary Log: May 9, 2013 (cyber security)

 Our meeting started with a lot of really great news and exciting announcements.  We all work very hard all year to make our club goals a reality, and at this time of year we get to celebrate those accomplishments and the people and organizations that benefit from them.  Bill Hurley started with a board update to the club summarizing what has been a very successful year.  Portsmouth Rotary raised over twenty thousand additional dollars we can give back to the community.   The board met last week and approved the following additional donations and allocations:  $10,000 to the newly formed Basic Needs Committee,  $5,000 to the African Burying Ground, $2,500 to the Memorial Bridge Lighting project, as well as an additional $2800 in incremental scholarship funding, bringing our total scholarship funding this year to $25,000 total.  The scholarship funding total includes scholarship money from the new Joe Shanley Memorial scholarship fund.  The board also voted to establish the new Troy Pappas Memorial Fund in cooperation with John and his family and voted to contribute $1000 to it.  The remaining $2500 in funds will be donated to the Rotary International World Share fund, to reflect our commitment to international projects.  

President-elect Dave updated us on our charitable plan for 2013-14.  Our goal this year is $153,000, which includes a number of key increases.  We are raising our budget for Basic Needs donations to $20,000 and reorganizing our club committees to put food drives, donations, operation warm coats and other basic needs into a single committee.   This $20,000 is in addition to the endowment fundraising we do with our charity golf tournament....so for the first time our goal is to raise at least $20,000 for the endowment, AND give away another $20,000 to the community. 

We are launching a new multi-club food drive at the Thunder Chicken road race, in partnership with other area Rotary Clubs.  We are increasing our scholarship target next year to over $26,000 including the new Joseph J. Shanley scholarships.  We are increasing our commitments to Polio Plus and the Rotary Foundation through the EREY program, which stands for Every Rotarian Every Year.  The board also approved an operating budget in the face of increased district dues, decreased revenues from website ads and lunch income.  We decided to move the "happy bucks and fine" revenue from the charitable budget over to the operating budget.  As a reminder, the costs of running our club are not in our charitable budget.   Approximately 75% of your annual dues go directly to Rotary International and the District to cover operating expenses.  Club dues have not gone up since Ted Alex president, ten years ago!  After much discussion and due diligence, President-Elect Dave Underhill was happy to announce that the board has OK'd a balanced budget and the dues will remain $125 for the upcoming year......provided they are paid before August 1.  In the interest of completing completely forthright, Dave added that it's almost certain that there will be a dues increase next year, and in consideration of VP Tricia Cummings,  he reiterated “You heard it here first: the next board will almost certainly have to increase the annual dues”.  We can all help with this year’s budget crunch by renewing our website ads, bragging with a lot of happy bucks,  and helping Neil and Butch fine your neighbors!  

FYI!  All these new budgets, goals and committees are in the member club documents section of the web site.   

Ben Wheeler addressed the club about our annual Portsmouth Rotary Golf Tournament  June 21^st.  He recognized many awesome sponsors but they are still looking for Rotarians to put together a team and of course more sponsors are always welcome and needed.  The Golf tournament funds our endowment. 

Rotary Youth Exchange is searching for host parents for our exchange student, who will be attending Portsmouth High School next year. Contact Lynn McClaren if you are interested or know a family that would be. 

Ryan Barton, Pres of Mainstay Technologies made a presentation about the importance of our own personal, on-line security. Our speaker today quickly caught the attention of the crowd by pointing out that the information available on a smart phone today is more information than President Clinton had access to when he was president!   He then went on to mention Google glasses, which apparently record everything you see?  This can be very cool but the down side is that they are very easily hacked into, and this allows a hacker to see your security codes on your phone, house, work, etc.  His point:  for every good technology,  there's a bad use for it.  There is a very scary war going on now internationally as to who can hack our technology and there have been cyber terrorist attacks on the US, including military defense corporations.  We have also engaged in this type of war.  The US and Israel helped target the Iranian nuclear program using a virus to disable their nuclear capacity.  In response to these threats, President Obama has commissioned a task force on cyber security.  We have very little protection.  Organizational threats, to corporations for example,  are the next level of threat we face.  There are folks trying to target your client and corporate privileged information.

  Social engineering is a way of getting information for unsuspecting employees and customers.

He used Sarah Palin as a good example of how social engineering works.   Hackers answered her password reset questions using family information that was easily available about her and hacked into her email.

He advised using a holistic security approach: a blanket over all of your data.  Companies should have policies and staff handbooks and staff training in place to secure data.   IT folks have the best firewalls and updates, use them to track where data goes.  He also advised having a password on  your smart phone, with the ability to wipe your phone remotely should it be lost or stolen.  From an individual standpoint, 96 percent of breaches can be avoided by using strong and complex and unique passwords.

Use a password program to store your passwords on your phone!  Install updates when they come up and pay attention to emails that you open.  Look at all financial accounts that you have to make sure that you cannot wire money out of it without some second form of authorization.  Be wary of open wireless networks, don't use any open networks to access anything confidential at all.

Cloud computing servers located over the Internet.  It can be very secure but you need to be very aware of the security of the firms you are using.   Fingerprint recognition and face recognition is still far off. 

Be very careful about links that you hit on your phones. It you hit the wrong link they can access all of the information in your phone.  It is better to cut and paste any phone numbers or links before using them.  All in all, his presentation started many conversations and raised member’s awareness of the realities we are facing in this brave new world!