As Christmas approaches, amidst sore heads, panic buying for our partners and Brexit being all over the news, we now have to remember more passwords, to avoid our well earned money being syphoned out of our accounts through the internet.
The list below, whilst not exhaustive, gives you a good start at protecting yourself against a malicious attack.
- Approval word or phrase– all staff who make payments within a business should have a secret authorisation word. This will ensure that any email asking for immediate payment will be vetted.
- Beware of urgency – most scams will try and make you commit to payments, logging in, checking payments immediately. Take a step back, think and then decide if this is legitimate or fake.
- Simple passwords – use something other than Pa55w0rd, Letme1N, or your pet dogs name.
- Don’t click on links in email – go to the site and login (look for the https: too)
- Data collection without you knowing it? For example, have you seen the Facebook quiz that’s asks you for your maiden name, middle name and pets name to reveal you hidden screen name. Ever thought that someone may be collecting vital information that could compromise your login?
Most People Use The Same Password For Several Accounts, Giving Hackers Access To Everything If Your Password Is Exposed.
Check to see if your password has been compromised?
Check to see if email address has been compromised?
The safest way to store all of your passwords is by using a password manager, there are several good services for this including 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane and RoboForm. These services store all login credentials in one highly secure vault for which you only have to remember one password. Ensure whichever password manager you use has multi factor authentication when setting up, as this will help prevent unauthorised access to your account and compromising your valuable data.
If You Do Nothing Else This Christmas.
Ensure you have a data backup plan. This means a copy of all your valuable data somewhere other than on your network. Having a hard drive connected to your server is no longer a solution as crypto software will encrypt both the server and the hard drive.
Finally…
We, at Matrix Business IT, hope you have found the above of use and wish you a very Merry Christmas. We sincerely hope that your waist line is your worry at Christmas and not your online security.
Concerned? contact a member of the Matrix team on 01329 888444 or Click here to email us.
