By Victoria Lara
Last week I invested several hours changing my passwords, account access, and login information. Why you may ask? Last Saturday at 4:09 am, I received an email that said the following:
“Good News! It is now easy to move money between your X Bank accounts and your external accounts…..” Then provided instructions on how to do so, I checked the rest of my inbox and it turned out that I had a total of seven emails, one for each of my accounts, both personal and business accounts- telling me they were ready to be transferred.
I was in panic mode, since I never requested something like that. I was afraid I was going to find my account balance to be zero; it was a terrifying feeling. I started to change login information, passwords, etc… That day I woke up at 4AM and checked my email. I have learned a lot from this experience and besides investing a lot of time on all these changes and some disappointments, nothing major happened.
Like I mentioned before, it was a terrifying feeling. Just the thought of having worked so hard, for so many years, and that all of a sudden a hacker could take all of our money and resources in a matter of seconds- gave me chills. Regardless of what insurance the banks offer us, it is always better to prevent this from happening in the first place.
I am a person who trusts others and doesn’t like micromanagement, but you can never be too careful. These are some of my tips I would like to share with you in hopes that you can share with others, if you find them useful. Do not become another statistic; be careful of hackers and with everyone in general.
10 Tips for Small Business Security
- Check your security level with your files, information, equipment use, etc… This way you can find out how vulnerable you are (or how strong you are) and see how easy (or hard) it would be for somebody with the intention to get your information can be.
- Do not keep information you don’t need, destroy it.
- Talk to your staff: Your business is as secure as your staff protects your information or as weak as if they do not protect your information. Your staff plays an important role to protect and secure your business assets.
- Have everyone change their passwords frequently, use strong and difficult passwords with numbers, signs, capital letters and many more variety. Get creative!
- Do not make a document with all of your passwords and print it or have it available for everyone to see.
- Do not write the password of computers on sticky note and put it on the front of the computer.
- Encrypt your data, now a days there are multiple and simple ways to do it.
- Back up information, files and documents you need for your work. Don’t just have these in one computer.
- Establish a secure policy and ask your employees to sign it.
- Be very careful moving business information on personal smart phones
Be careful; protect yourself and your business.
I know all these make sense, but sometimes we are so invested on creating the part of the business we love and we don’t take care of the “not so exciting” aspect. We need to, it is vital.