The top spy agency of the United States has released a comprehensive best practices guide that covers many devices and user behaviors both at work and their homes.

Vaguely entitled "Best Practices for Keeping Your Home Network Secure", the document released by the National Security Agency (NSA) actually includes tips on what not to share on social networking sites, how to secure your work and personal email accounts, including mobile devices such as iPad and smart phones.

To secure your home network, the NSA recommends using alternate DNS servers not provided by your ISP, which typically do not provide security services such as blocking and blacklisting of dangerous and infected web sites. Incidentally, this feature became standard on SolidDNS™ appliances beginning with version 4.

One eye-catching tip in the 8-page document is the recommendation to upgrade to Windows 7 and Vista and to Microsoft Office 2007 or later. Only a few years ago, it was widely reported and vehemently denied that Microsoft had secretly built into Windows a backdoor prepared by the NSA.

One of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world, the NSA is responsible for collecting and analyzing foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence.

You can download the NSA document by clicking this link. To know more about SolidDNS™ and download its datasheet, click here.