New Cyber Security Mailing List
Newsletter with tips and stategies to stay safe
The City of Seattle's Office of Information Security (OIS) has setup a new computer security mailing list. We will post a periodic newsletter with cyber security tips and strategies to keep you safe on your work and home computers. We'll also send out notices of critical new threats and information on how to protect yourselves.

If you would like to sign up for this new service, please click on the following link and then create a New User account.   
Computer Security Mailing List

New Security Tip O' d'Week!

The Event Viewer

There is an interesting feature that you will find when you open up the Computer Management Window, called 'Event Viewer'.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: Within the City of Seattle municipal government offices you may not have access to The Computer Management window. If you do, it is OK to look through and become familiar with the information but you should never make changes to these settings on City equipment. This tip is for your home computer only.).

To review quickly how to get there, first open Explorer (not Internet Explorer, but Windows Explorer), by right clicking on the 'Start' button and selecting, 'Explore'(note that this process should be similar in other versions of Windows, but this is specifically referring to Windows XP.

Next find and right click on the 'My Computer' folder in Explorer and select, 'Manage'.

This will open up a window with the title "Computer Management". The Event Viewer is located in the left hand pane below System Tools. In that window, click on the plus sign next to the 'Event Viewer' icon (in the left hand pane) to open up the different event logs.

You will see three event log files that you can view: Application, Security and System. The application log is a listing of events that have taken place related to different applications running on your computer. The security log shows events like logon/logoff, etc. The system log shows events that are related to the operating system and possibly network connections.

If you double click on one of the items, it will open up another window with more information. It will also have a link to even more information from Microsoft. If you click on the link it will ask for permission to send some data to Microsoft about the event you are viewing and then link you to specific information on that event.

While a lot of this may seem difficult to understand at first and even meaningless, it can be helpful if you have been having trouble with your computer. Some of the information, especially errors and warnings in the logs, might help you to troubleshoot issues that have been plaguing your computer. If you note the time and applications that seem to have the problems, and then open up these event viewers - you may find errors or information about what was happening at the time. This could help you, or a technician, in correcting the problem.

So, even though this might seem a little daunting and technical at first, I encourage you to look around and become familiar with the Event Viewer. It will actually help you to understand how your computer is working and all of the events that take place behind the scenes.