Is your company computer protected from hackers? Companies lose over $400 billion to hackers yearly, and while most of us believe we’re doing “enough” to protect our data, that’s not always the case. Consider implementing the following guidelines:
- Protect your computers by making sure your browser, OS, applications, firewalls, and antivirus software are the newest versions.
- Protect your mobile device by being careful with Wi-Fi networks (especially public, unprotected ones) and by turning off Bluetooth when you’re not using it.
- Ignore spam. This seems easy, but with more sophisticated phishing emails impersonating friends or trusted business associates, it’s easy for people to fall victim to phishing emails that put an entire company at risk.
- Back up your data. If you aren’t already doing this, start immediately in case hackers would succeed in corrupting your system and all your data.
- Use a longer, complex password with upper-case letters, lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols! This makes you less likely to fall risk to brute-force attacks because each character set or character length of your password exponentially increases the number of possible passwords for a hacker’s program to crack. While using only letters or numbers, a 10-character password can still be cracked instantly. However, did you know that a 10-character password containing numbers, upper and lowercase letters, and symbols would take five years to crack?
A 16-character password with the same character sets would take one trillion years to crack! The longer and more complex your password is, the safer your data will be.