I recently gave a workshop on security which included examples of scams that are being used to get access to your computer and data, including e-mail phishing scams. About 20% of the audience had stories of their own about security breaches in their own company or those of friends and colleagues. That is a very high percentage.
YOU are the key ingredient to stopping data breaches. Most scammers get access by guessing easy passwords, repeat passwords (using the same password in multiple places) or simply getting you to click on a link that will download malware to your computer or phone.
The passwords issue is easy to fix. You just have to do it! It’s impossible to have a different password for each site we use, but we can certainly group them and change them every 6 months. Creating a password that is at least 12 characters long and including upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters makes it much harder to guess.
Emails and texts are getting quite tricky as scammers have gotten very good at getting their spam to look credible by using familiar company logos. Be sure to read the message – sometimes when something looks familiar, we open it without truly reading the message first. Hints that the message is fake include grammatical errors, a generic greeting and asking for sensitive information. Scammers are sending out bank letters, job offers, letters from your employer that look so legitimate it’s sometimes hard not to make a mistake.
Should you open one of these by mistake, immediately disconnect from the Internet and then run your entire computer through your anti malware software to clean out anything that might be at risk. Use anti malware on each device you have that connects to the Internet, cell phone, tablets, laptops. Always make sure that you have a current backup. If you have a lot of smart home devices, it would be prudent to add a firewall to your Internet connection.
Be safe.