Hello everyone and happy October – or should I say, Cybersecurity Awareness Month! As the weather continues to beg for bonfire socials and the falling leaves remind us of our yard work, we wanted to take the opportunity to talk about something less tangible but just as important.
Keeping up with cybersecurity is quickly becoming more important with each passing day. There seems to be a news story every week about another big company falling victim to a security breach, and tools like Artificial Intelligence are making the attacks more sophisticated and harder to identify all the time. We want to offer our clients, family, and friends several resources and ideas to maintain a secure in-home system.
Password managers
As a part of maintaining the security of our firm, as well as the privacy of our own and our clients’ personal information, we change our passwords quite frequently. One of the tools to manage the ever-growing list of logins has been a password management program such as 1Password, LastPass, or NordPass. These programs create complex, unique multi-character passwords for each of your different logins. As the name suggests, these programs maintain these passwords (so you’re not in charge of remembering them) and protect access to those passwords through a Two-Factor-Authentication system.
Software updates
This is a love-hate piece of advice – keep your systems updated! Nothing frustrates us more than getting into a groove at work and then being alerted of a “15 minute Windows update that will begin in 10 seconds.” Even though it may get in the way of your progress, these updates are crucial to maintaining a secure device. Unless you stay up-to-date on the patch notes of each update, there’s no telling whether or not there will be important security measures added/adjusted as a part of an update. Best practice would be to adjust your Settings so security software automatically checks for and downloads updates when they are available.
Making sure your loved ones have access to your passwords.
No one likes thinking about what life will be like for loved ones after you’re gone, but we urge you to consider what it will be like as they attempt to gather your information if something happens to you. A place where your family/trusted contacts can easily find and access your logins will save them many headaches as they process and settle your estate.
There are many more things that one can do to stay secure, but these three are an excellent way to start. For addition suggestions or to ask other questions you may have, please reach out to us our Plymouth office at 763-587-7120