Helpful security reminders to keep you and your organization safe!

CoryBrester

With many of us working from different locations or with different computer setups than we may be used to, it's important to remember to protect yourself - and your organization - from cyber criminals. Here are some helpful tips:

Password Security: You wouldn’t give a stranger the keys to your house, so why make it easy for them to get into your online accounts? Here are some tips to help keep yourself safe. 

1. Never share passwords with others.
2. Keep passwords unique for each account. 
3. The longer your password, the better. The current best practice is that passwords should be longer than 12-15 characters and should be passphrases vs passwords. 
4. Consider length over complexity but increase complexity using special characters.
5. Always use Multi-Factor Authentication when possible. 
6. Change passwords immediately if you ever feel they are compromised.

This site is a great place to see if your account is part of a compromised data breach: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Email Security: With inboxes filling up with emails its important to step back and validate URLs and senders. 

1. Avoid phishing attempts by ensuring any links in an email are actually hyperlinked to the true website. 
2. Always be alert to spoofed or misleading emails, if the sender doesn’t seem quite right or what they are requesting is a bit misleading, call or connect with them through another medium to confirm the validity.
3. Never open attachments unless you are expecting them or trust the senders.

Work from Home Security: IT departments invest a lot of money in internal network security to keep an office safe. At home, you should consider similar steps to protect work assets. 

1. Always connect to a VPN, if provided by your organization, to create a secure encrypted tunnel back to your office. 
2. Change your default passwords on your wireless routers and set up guest networks to keep your visitors' devices separate from your work equipment. 
3. Keep the same security best practices from the office top of mind at home. 
4. Lock your computer when you walk away.
5. If you are traveling, don’t leave your laptop in your car. 
6. If your job requires you to print sensitive data, shred or destroy it immediately when done, or store securely in a safe. 
7. Finally, never transfer data off company equipment to your own computers or storage devices.

I hope you find these helpful!

-Cory

Director of CRM & Information Systems @ Foundant Technologies

TracyLarimer

These are great tips! Another suggestion is to consider a tool like LastPass to generate and store passwords. This allows you to have secure, random, unique passwords for everything without having to remember them.