Here at Eipsys, we are always excited for the festive season. However, as exciting Christmas is, its important to take precautions when it comes to the security of your business. Unfortunately opportunists spend their Christmas attempting to breach data and jeopardise organisations - so we have come up with ten top tips to stay safe and prevent this from happening to your business.
Ensure all of your staff are educated and fully aware of the potential threats and know how to recognise basic attacks. This can help employees recognise and avoid clicking on suspicious links that they may receive in an attachment from an email or message.
Keep your security systems updated It is important to keep your cyber security measures up to date because of the speed threats evolve. Not keeping security tools up to date doesn't keep you much safer than not having them at all.
Make sure your emails are fully protected. Email encryption is the industry standard for data protection. Whether you are sharing a document password with colleagues or negotiating a confidential client deal, it’s essential to use the best email encryption available to ensure you are safeguarded.
Make sure you have an excellent firewall system in place. Firewalls prevent unauthorised access to your business network and alert you to any intrusion attempts. They also block pop ups, advertisements and protect you from numerous other threats whilst online.
Have a back-up recovery system in place. It is very important to assume that your data could be lost at any time even if you have systems in place to prevent this. This is why it is crucial for your business to have a back-up recovery system in place, which can restore any data that you may have lost in the quickest possible time. Having disaster recovery systems in place has helped save businesses thousands of pounds.
Network passwords should be changed to something unique. When you are working from home, it is important to make sure your Wi-Fi password has been changed from the default that the router comes with. We recommend that you contact your broadband provider if you are unable to do this yourself and ask for this to be changed to something unique and difficult to guess. This is to ensure that your password cannot be extracted from Google and keeps your Wi-Fi more secure.
Use different passwords for every platform and device you use. Hackers know how lazy we are with passwords so using easily guessed passwords on more than one platform or device can put you at big risk for being hacked. Changing your passwords for each platform and device can prevent you from having more than one attack.
Issue a two-factor authentication for additional security. Two-factor authentication can vastly increase your security levels on different platforms. It is a second form of proof to validate you are the correct person that should be logging in. It is a way of ensuring that even if someone gets through one stage of security, they will not pass through the second.
Utilise the cloud for additional security. By storing your data and using platforms that use the cloud, you can help your business run securely and consistently. The cloud can be used to store secure data in terms of back-up recovery needs and through platforms like Microsoft Teams as a secure communication tool.
Always log out of your work platforms when you are not using them. This can prevent by-passers from looking at or accessing your data when you are not in the room. Also some cyber-attacks happen from another person gaining access to your system, so its important to always make sure to log-off or lock it when not in use.