Cyber Security Month is rolling to a close and so we have taken time to check what the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre advise us about keeping secure online. Who better to give guidance?
Firstly they urge us all to keep our email secure. What could a criminal access with visibility of all your emails? Not just as an individual but as an organisation? Where, for example, do your ‘forgot password’ emails go? Their suggestion is therefore that you create a super strong password for your email and that using 3 random words is an excellent solution, particularly interspersed with characters as they must be. So Digger£Cap!Help is better than your daughter’s name 123.
Two step verification makes it extra hard to gain access to an account so set it up and switch it on even if it does slightly slow down the log on process (and make you chronically concerned about losing your mobile phone and what that would do to ever getting online again!).
They recommend using a ‘Password Manager’ app but remind us that this needs to have an excellent password in order to protect it and for heaven’s sake, don’t write that one down or store it anywhere it can be accessed by anyone other than yourself.
Backing up data is easy to overlook and now most people think they have a copy saved in the cloud. But, it’s worth making a regular check to see that your online automatic saving is in fact working and if you don’t have that feature yet, that you are taking backups regularly. An IT expert would recommend not relying solely on the cloud if your data is vital to your business but also take a regular physical backup copy and keep it offsite. Removable drives come in terabytes so have capacity to store a huge amount of data and are not expensive well, not compared to the value you would put on your lost business if you didn’t have access to that data.
Keep software up-to-date so it has the latest security features.
Control the number of people who have privileged access to your system accounts and make sure leavers are removed from access privileges.
Acer offer cyber insurance. A cyber security policy doesn’t simply mean you can afford to replace or clean up your equipment in the event of a cyber attack but can cover costs you are unlikely to have though of such as the cost of investigation or claims against you for breach of data confidentiality. Every business has different needs so call our team of specialist advisers for a quote.
