Reduce your IT Risk!
Every day there are articles about how businesses and organisations have been negatively affected by hijackings in ‘Cyber Space’. Just this week there have been reports of entities having to pay ransomware of over $500,000 just to get their systems back up and running.
Ransomware and other forms of malicious code are causing such havoc, that even the American FBI released a warning on how to spot attacks and what to look out for: (https://www.ic3.gov/media/2019/190610.aspx).
Here are just some news headlines;
Canadian City Loses Half a Million to Phishing Attack
Ransomware Halts Production for Days at Major Airplane Parts Manufacturer
Voicemail Phishing Scam Steals Credentials
Hackers are stealing personal medical data to impersonate your doctor:
To make matters worse for business and IT, countries are now waging ‘Cyber War’ with each other, with businesses suffering from the ‘fall-out’.
Headline a while back: The U.S. Launched A Cyber Attack On Iran, And We’re Expecting Spear Phishing Strike Backs
What can you, the business owner do to reduce the risk from all these threats?
After 20 years of providing IT support to small and medium enterprises, these are the basics that we recommend to all businesses;
Data Backup – ensure that you have a secure, automated, offsite backup solution , whereby all company data is backed up, at least on a daily basis. Without this you are at extreme risk. With this in place, your vulnerability is significantly reduced. As we tell our customers, if there is some sort of disaster, we can rebuild all systems, reconfigure all applications and replace all broken equipment. What we cannot do, is recreate your data. As such, data backup is a necessity! (If you’re concerned, contact us and we will gladly assist)
If the data is stored locally, then we have a managed solution to back this data up to the Cloud, securely and automatically.
If your data is stored in the Cloud, (such as Office365), then we back this data up to a different region.
Thus, in the event of an unforeseen problem, we can always recover your data!
Security and Awareness – here are some recommendations for you to further minimise risk;
Ensure all Online Accounts have a secure password. In fact, start using a Pass Phrase – a random sentence that you can remember, that has more than 20 characters in it
Ensure every Online Account has a unique password, so that if one account gets compromised, this won’t put all the other accounts at risk
Wherever possible, enable Two Factor Authentication, (2FA or MFA), on all accounts – this includes your Apple Account, your Gmail account, Your Office 365 Account, Facebook, Instagram and all other services you use
Ensure all your devices are running the latest Operating System with all patches applied and that all applications used are also kept up to date with the latest updates
OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE – Be aware of what attachments you’re opening, what links you’re clicking on and what websites you’re visiting – the most common way that organisations get compromised is through these Internet resources and playing on peoples lack of knowledge, curiosity, FOMO. In this regard it is MOST IMPORTANT that you have virus and malicious software protection that scans incoming emails and other messages and warns you of potential dangers.
If you’re concerned about your technical ability to implement these suggestions, please contact us and we will gladly assist!
