Protect Yourself From Hackers

No, we don’t just mean the 30 year-old guys sitting in their Grandmother’s basement, frantically typing out lines of code on a black screen… Hackers come in all shapes and sizes!

Check out our previous blog posts to find out more:

Hackers – Who Are They?

What Can Hackers Do?

We’re talking about people around us, sitting in the same café, sharing a bus, even working for you! It’s scary times we live in, and the digital world is constantly changing. So here are some things you can do to protect yourself from data theft!

The best way to protect yourself from fraud...

...is to apply layers of protection

TRAINING

If you’re a business, start with training your employees; if you’re an individual, do some training of your own.

Lock your computer when you leave your desk too – an open computer can be very tempting for someone to jump on and take what they want!

Also, have an Email Security solution in place to help filter out malicious emails and links before they even reach your inbox.

What percentage of phishing attacks come via email?

According to one study, 96% of phishing attacks are by email

But it only takes 1 click to compromise your systems.

PROTECTION

We’re always reminded to wear protection…

Well, your computer’s no different! Install a reputable antivirus on all your machines – preferably one with a proactive Endpoint Detection Response built-in.

If you don’t yet have an antivirus, get in touch to find out what we can offer you for your business or home computers.

BACKUP

Always, always, always!

Backup your data in a separate location to the main source – and regularly test it’s backing up!

If you only have 1 copy of your data, think about how little you can do if it gets encrypted, lost or stolen. Could you bear to lose it for good?

UPDATES

Keeping your systems up-to-date is vital.

If you’re on an old version of your Operating System or haven’t updated your Apps in a while, you won’t have the latest patches which are released to fix any bugs and exploits, meaning you could be vulnerable to an attack!

Check for updates regularly.

WI-FI

If you offer your customers Wi-Fi, make sure you give them a separate network to the one your computers use. Otherwise, you could find hackers are stealing data, credentials, and bank info!

As a home-user, make sure you’ve changed your default Wi-Fi details. Your internet provider usually sets them to the same thing for all their routers – something like admin with a password such as 1234 – that’s not secure!!

SUMMARY

In summary, there are many other things you can add to your layers of protection, but these should be the foundations. Just make sure you:

SECURE your systems;

TRAIN your staff or yourself;

UPDATE your computers;

BACKUP your data!