Cameron Camp, a researcher at the global cybersecurity company ESET, lives in an area where emergency situations are not uncommon as it has one of the highest rates of fire evacuation cases worldwide.
Because of his experience, he urges us to learn how to prepare it technology us so that we can react immediately in case we are asked to leave our premises immediately due to imminent danger.
Here are some tips from Cameron to help you get started "Emergency backpack" if you suddenly need to leave home or office and need your communications devices, your data and a way to do it during an emergency.
Prepare a plan in advance
This means that you must first have one emergency backpack. Don't forget chargers and cables. Extra batteries are essential, but just as essential is some sort of small solar charger or even a suitcase generator that you can get for a few tens or hundreds of euros. With technology becoming less and less power-hungry, days can go by without the need to charge your devices. But when there is a prolonged power outage, all devices at some point turn off.
Scan (or photograph) important documents such as driver's licenses/ ID card, booklets, passports, certificates, contracts, financial documents etc. If you can, save them to a password-protected file, an encrypted virtual disk, or an external disk USB etc. Even as photos on your smartphone can help you.
Find alternatives to contact
During an emergency you may be able to use mobile data to communicate, but it is certain that the cellular network will be flooded as everyone will want to contact to find out what is going on.
Mobile antennas are not suitable to serve a sudden traffic storm, as this would significantly increase the cost of the infrastructure and in the end this infrastructure would remain largely unused. This would be very difficult to justify to investors.
This means that it is good to find another alternative. In some countries there are balanced multi-carrier routers available load(multicarrier, load-balancing routers) used by military and remote offices that must remain connected. These routers can seamlessly route data across a variety of available carriers and technologies.
In some cases satellite communication is possible, but such a service can be expensive, so the best you can do is limit your communication to text messages and e-mail of course to avoid videos.
Make backup copies online
If you're on the road and your tech breaks, there's a way to restore it to new devices. This usually means that you have backups in the cloud (cloud) or at least on external hard drives that you will carry with you. In a hurry, sometimes the laptops they are forgotten behind. Keep in mind that you will be out of tune, so here the key is surplus. Because you may not be able to connect to the internet at an evacuation site, local backups are also an option,
You also need to have a lot of confidence in the stability of your backups - knowing what to look out for and what the top five are. mistakes to avoid when backing up of your data will help you.
Always have spare food, fuel and money
Dealing with an emergency becomes very difficult when you do not have gas. "I have a friend who never lets his tank fall below half in case he has to drive suddenly in an emergency," says Cameron.
Also, in case of emergency, supermarkets are emptied almost immediately, as are banks and ATMs. This has happened many times in the city of Cameron. Storing some food, water and money can keep you safe for days or weeks - until normalcy is restored. And remember to refresh them often, as even dry and canned foods have an expiration date.
Practice
When you do your first readiness exercise there is almost a 100% chance you will spot the shortcomings. When the neighborhood of the ESET researcher decided to organize a fire evacuation exercise, the scenario assumed that no one would come to their rescue for days, so they had to be able to fight on their own. "It was then that we discovered that we were probably missing 3-4 items that all cost less than $ 20 each. One of them was a simple $ 5 pipe adapter. We did not have one, which meant we could not put out the fire in case of emergency. "
This all sounds simple, and certainly not very expensive, but unfortunately only a single digit percentage of the population would have tried it. Ignorance is not a strategy, nor is hope. While hope is essential, readiness enhances hope and will help you achieve it.
