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Keeping Your Digital Information Secure

In this day and age, effective cybersecurity solutions are an integral part of nearly all businesses large and small. Taking the proper precautions to keep your digital data secure from being corrupted by computer viruses or accessed by hackers can save your business from wasting large amounts of time and money in the future. In this article, we are going to focus on password security and discuss several steps your business can take to help ensure the protection of your digital information.

Password Management and Protection

One of the most common ways for a hacker to gain access to your digital data is by obtaining the password of one or more of your system’s users. In addition to the guidelines below, passwords should be changed on a frequent basis. There are administrative settings your IT department can use to automatically prompt users to change their passwords at specific time intervals.

Password protection

Phishing

Phishing is when a hacker sends an email with the objective of coaxing the recipient into providing them with their password. This is often done using a spoofed email address, making it look like the email came from a legitimate source, sometimes even emulating one of your business’s internal email addresses. It is important that all employees know that they will never be asked to provide their passwords, therefore any email requesting a password is not to be answered. Those emails should also be marked as spam and blocked from sending further communications to your email server.

Brute force hack

Brute Force Attack

A brute force attack is when a hacker obtains access to your network by running a program that goes through tens of thousands of letter, number, and symbol combinations until it finds the correct password. This is why it is extremely important for all users to have complex, unique passwords. And even though these types of passwords are hard to remember, they should never be written down or typed into a document or mobile phone. Consider using a password manager like 1Password or Dashlane to keep all user passwords secure, only accessible to those with administrative permissions. Most password management software costs under $100 per year, which is well worth it when you consider the incurred losses resulting from a data breach.

Two-Step Verification

There is a good chance that you have used an application or digital service that requires two-step verification to successfully sign in. Two-step verification, as the term implies, requires users to go through two steps in order to login, as opposed to simply entering their password. This usually involves a link or numerical code being automatically sent to the mobile phone or email address of the user attempting to login. This link or code is then used to fully validate that the person logging in is in fact that person. Most digital applications and email service providers offer free options to enable two-step verification. And the minor annoyance of the extra 15 to 30 seconds it takes to login using two-step verification far outweighs the devastation of a hacker gaining access to your digital data.

 
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