March, 2020

If you’ve read our blog on CEO fraud, you’ll know that hackers are getting more and more sly when it comes to different ways to attack people and businesses.

Whether it’s through hacking IT systems, sending fake emails or carrying out malware attacks, there are so many different ways a hacker can actively get into your systems and find out sensitive information about you or your business.

But, did you know you might be giving hackers easy access to your private information through your own social media?

Have you heard of doxing? Doxing (or reconnaissance) is the way criminals research and gather information about a target before using it maliciously, whether its by hacking directly, guessing passwords, or even going so far as to create the perfect, personalised trap to target you.

Cyber criminals look to collect all of the information available about you, and social media can make you an easy target.

We willingly and freely publish so much personal information about themselves publicly on social media, from friends and family members to photographs, home and workplace addresses – all of which makes us more vulnerable to attack.

Passwords and password recovery answers often use seemingly innocuous details like children’s names, pet’s names, their year of birth, place of birth. But, when researched on social media and combined, these can be the perfect tools to unlock your email, social media and bank accounts.

Even more concerning, stats released by the National Cyber Security Centre last year showed millions of people in the UK used combinations of basic, easy-to-guess passwords including:

• Passwords that include basic information that can be found easily from your social media – including your real name or username and family names, the football team you support.
• Place names, birthdays, or single dictionary words.
• Numerical or keyboard sequences (e.g. QWERTY, 12345)
• Names of comic book characters and bands

These types of passwords are easy to guess and pose a threat the security of your accounts. Hackers will be able to easily guess these types of passwords by analysing your personal information and making informative guesses.

Make it more difficult for hackers by taking extra steps to minimise these threats.

There are simple, straightforward ways to make your social media more secure, including making social media profiles private and removing anyone you don’t personally know from your following. Enabling two-factor authentication with phone numbers and separate emails can also make your online presence more secure.

Other ways to secure your accounts include:

• Regularly updating apps
• Blocking unknown accounts
• Making your passwords long, with combinations of upper- and lower-case letters, symbols and numbers
• Be careful when logging into accounts through email links – always check the sender details because this is another popular phishing scam
• Never share your passwords with anyone
• Use different passwords for different social media accounts
• Consider using a password manager

By making these simple changes, you can protect your own personal information from being analysed by potential hackers. By being aware of the dangers and taking some proactive, positive steps to reduce these risks can help keep your information from falling into the wrong hands.

These tips apply to your personal social media accounts, as well as your business and professional accounts. Want to talk to us about your business security? We offer a range of services including Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus, backup services, a top-range Disaster Recovery Suite, and IT support.

You can find out more about all of our different services at https://considerit.com/what-we-do/managed-it-services/

Would you leave your house unlocked if nearly half the homes in your area had been burgled? If an attack was likely, would you wait until after the break-in to act?

No? Then why treat your business that way?

As with any breach of security, a proactive response is always better than reactive – why wait for the damage to be done when you can try to prevent it in the first place?

With cyber attacks continually on the rise, it’s really important that all businesses, no matter their size, act proactively in response to the increase in attacks and successful hacks.

You might think reactive IT security will save you money, but it’s only in the short-term. In the longer-term you run the risk of increased financial costs, using the wrong tools for damage control, and no clear way of resolving issues.

Proactive approaches are all about anticipating that something might happen and being prepared for it. Proactive IT security leaves less room for cyber attackers to exploit your systems, and also makes it easier to identify problems sooner – and makes it easier to fix them.

Here are just two reasons why we think being proactive is the best attitude to take towards your IT security:

1. No more constant clean-up

Unfortunately, cyber-attacks are no longer a rarity. Once upon a time, it might have been worth your while holding off on investing in IT security. Now, when 1/3 of UK businesses suffered an IT breach last year alone, it’s no longer a matter of “if” we see another breach, it’s “when”.

1/3 of UK organisations suffered IT breaches last year, even though 70% invested in some sort of IT security. Without an element of proactive IT security, this figure would be a lot higher.

After an attack, more damage will have been done when you don’t have some element of proactive IT security in place. Attacks damage your safety measures; you likely lose data which causes financial and reputational damage as well.

Clean-up costs can be enough to make your eyes water, and even more when coupled with loss of productively or revenue. It’s best to have security measures continuously in place to lessen some of the damage.

2. Reactive security measures are often light work for pro-hackers

As much as you might believe otherwise, hackers will generally always be one step ahead – whether it’s through developing stealthier ways to attack, or new ways to hack and fool people.

Even the most unsophisticated hackers have access to coding which can easily evade antivirus (AV) detection. They’re often tuned into AV provider updates as well. This means that hackers get the same messages as clients when they are told to update their systems to account for new hacking codes.

This works as a push for hackers to roll out their new methods – putting businesses one-step behind the criminals.

It’s easy to treat IT security as something you don’t need straight away, but in the long run it’s much better for your company if you’re proactive about it. We can’t pretend a cyber attack just won’t happen – they’re becoming more and more likely every year as we become more globally and digitally-connected.

We can sit back and wait to do something after an attack, or we can be proactive and put in place some preventative measures to make your business less likely to be breached in the first place. Not only will this help put your mind at ease, it can also make your clients and customers at ease that their information will be less accessible to hackers.

With all this in mind, there’s so much that we at Consider IT can do to help you protect your business and your clients from cyberattacks before the take place, saving you in the long-term.

We can help you with everything from support services to improve productivity, increase security and reduce the overall costs to your business, to bring you through Cyber Essentials Accreditations. We’ll turn your back up platform from a “recovery in days/weeks” situation to “we’ll have you online anywhere in the world within 15 minutes”.

We even offer our purpose-built Disaster Recovery suite for your team to use in times of crisis.

Find out about all of the services we have on offer at https://considerit.com/what-we-do/managed-it-services/cyber-security/cyber-essentials/

Get in touch with us on 0131 510 0110 or [email protected] to chat about our IT support services.