10 Tips To Keep Your Business Safe This Christmas

Here at CSG we are always excited for the festive season. However, as exciting as Christmas as a whole can be, it is important to take precautions when it comes to the security of your business because opportunists use Christmas as a way to breach high-end data and jeopardise organisations. We have come up with ten top tips to ensure this does not happen to you and your business.

CSG’s 10 Top Tips To Stay Safe This Christmas

1. Ensure all of your staff are aware of the potential threats and are fully informed on how to avoid the most basic of attacks.  This can help employees to notice suspicious links that may be attached to emails or messages and avoid them at all costs.
2. Make sure you have the most up to date cyber security measures. With cyber threats constantly evolving with the rate of new technology, it is important that our cyber security measures are always contemporary and updated, this can help us to be protected from threats that may not even ‘exist’. A cyber security risk assessment can provide you with an in-depth analysis of your current measures.
3. Ensure your emails are fully protected. Artificial Intelligence has helped transform email security in a way that even the most advanced threats will not be able to access your inbox. Here at CSG we use Sophos email security to ensure that we can block all dodgy email senders and prevent anything unrecognised from entering our inbox.
4. Ensure you have an excellent firewall system in place to ward off any threats in your network. Firewalls are an amazing way to block pop-ups, advertisements and numerous other threats when browsing online. Sophos XG Firewall can help detect and prevent threats in advance, therefore allowing you to browse the internet without having worries. It detects potential threats and puts a stop to them pro-actively.
5. Have a back-up recovery system in place. It is always important to assume that your data could be lost at any given moment – even if you have every system in place to make this highly unlikely. This is why it is crucial for your business to have a back-up recovery system in place that can restore any data that you may have lost in the fastest possible time. Disaster recovery has helped save businesses thousands of pounds.
6. Network (wi-fi) passwords should be changed to something unique. When working from home, it is important that your wi-fi password is not a default one that comes with the router. You need to call up your broadband provider and change this to something unique and hard to guess. This will ensure that your wi-fi is always secure and your password cannot be extracted from google.
7. Use a different password for every platform and device that is in use. Password security is a seriously important topic of discussion because passwords that can be guessed easily and are used on more than one platform or device, can seriously put you at high risk of being cyber-hacked. By changing your passwords per platform and device, you can prevent yourself from having more than one attack.
8. Issue a two-factor authentication for extra security. Two-factor authentication can vastly increase your security levels on different platforms as it is a second form of proof that you are the correct person that should be logging in at that given moment on that given platform or device. It is a way of ensuring that even if someone gets passed one stage of security, they will not pass through the second.
9. Utilise the cloud for extra security. By storing your data and using platforms that use the cloud, you can help your business to run securely and consistently. The cloud can be used to store secure data in terms of back-up recovery needs, and can be used as a secure communication tool for platforms like Microsoft Teams.
10. Always log out of your work platforms when they are not in use. This can prevent by-passers from looking at data when you are not in the room. Sometimes cyber-attacks can occur from another person using your machine, so always make sure to log-off or lock it when not using it.

“Business are attacked online every 2.5 minutes”

…Don’t let it be yours!