Cybersecurity Assessments:
The Key to Understanding & Limiting Risk
Wednesday, December 15th at 11:00AM
Hackers Are Stepping Up Their Game This Holiday Season
The holiday season has almost arrived, and more Americans are expected to turn to online shopping this year than ever before. The ongoing pandemic, combined with convenience, makes online shopping an obvious choice for most consumers.
Unfortunately, online shopping has been muddied with hackers and cyberthieves since its debut. There are still safe places on the Internet where we should feel comfortable to shop, though. If you are careful about where you spend your money or share your personal information, online shopping can feel just as safe as entering a store.
Here are our five best tips to ensure that your online holiday shopping is safe and secure.
Stick To Secure Websites
When shopping online, you want to ensure that every site you visit is secure. Look at the browser bar when entering a new site. If there is a small padlock icon to the left of the web address, the site is secure and you should feel safe to continue. Google Chrome goes an extra step and will label unsecure sites as “not secure” so you know to stay away. Another quick way to tell if a site is secure is by looking at the web address. If it begins in “https,” you’re good to go. If the “s” is missing at the end and it starts with “http,” the site is not secure, and you should find somewhere else to shop.
Don’t Be Afraid To Use
Your Phone
You can shop on your phone just as easily as you do on your computer, and the portable aspect should not worry you. Major corporations like Amazon and Walmart have secure apps with seemingly unlimited items to purchase. Making purchases directly on apps avoids the hassle of going to the company’s website, where your connection might not be as secure. It also helps to set up an Apple or Google Pay account, as businesses will not be able to get your bank account information from these sources.
If you do decide to shop on your mobile device, make sure that you are not on public WiFi. Public WiFi is rarely secure, and using it could make you an easy target for hackers. They could get any personal information you enter while on the WiFi. It’s better to bookmark the products and purchase them when you are on a private connection.
Use A Password Manager
To keep your information secure, it’s imperative to utilize strong and complex passwords that are difficult to crack. Avoid using personal information and using the same password across accounts. To make things easier for yourself, utilize a password manager to keep track of all of your different passwords. This way, you can create complex passwords that even the best of hackers can’t figure out. Make sure to use a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and
special punctuation to make the most secure password possible.
Take A Pass On Amazing Deals
If you come across a price that just seems too good to be true, chances are it probably is. If you search for an item on a search engine, you may see prices way lower than those of major retailers. These options could be on unsecured sites as a front to try to steal your information or it could be someone who doesn’t actually have the item trying to make a quick dollar. While the deal might seem like something you can’t pass up, it may cost you more in the long run, and you might not even get the product.
Pay Attention To Bank Statements
You won’t always know when someone gets access to your personal information or bank accounts. By paying attention to your bank statements, you can catch overcharges or purchases that you did not make. Always use a credit card when shopping online because hackers will not be able to access any of your actual money. Most credit cards come with fraud protection that prevents you from being liable for charges you never actually made.
As long as you take the necessary precautions, shopping online is a safe and financially responsible practice. If you follow these tips, your holiday shopping will go as smoothly as possible.
A Winning Strategy To The Game Of Building A Business
Life isn’t always easy. Sometimes we sit back and expect things to happen for us or we simply do as we’re told and expect great things, but it’s not always that easy. While defensive mindsets can be beneficial in some areas, if you want your business to grow, then you need to play aggressive offense.
I first got into real estate not long after Black Monday and the recession that hit in the early ‘90s. At the time, many other realtors relied on defensive tactics. They waited by the phone for prospective buyers to contact them or they waited at an open house for potential buyers to walk in. But that’s not how you get business.
I had no prior training in real estate when I entered, but that didn’t stop me from becoming a dominant force in the field. We didn’t have millions of dollars to buy subscribers or begin a widespread advertising campaign. Instead, we went after highly targeted strategic partners and I keynoted at large conferences to build our subscriber base. We came out of the recession with more than 5 million subscribers because of our aggressive actions.
During various recessions, companies that have made a point of being aggressive in their campaigns have seen great growth. During the Great Depression in the 1920s, Post was the dominant leader in the breakfast market. They decided to cut their advertising while one of their competitors, Kellogg’s, decided to double theirs. Kelloggs’s profits grew by 30% during the recession, and they became the top dog in the market, where they have remained ever since.
During the energy crisis of the 1970s, Volkswagen, the car import leader of the time, cut growth spending. Toyota decided to double its spending focused on marketing and growth and became the #1 car import company. Volkswagen was bumped down to fifth. Toyota is still the leader of car imports and is three times larger than Volkswagen.
Elon Musk is one of the greatest offensive businessmen of the last century. In 2016, South Australia’s electrical grid was knocked out due to a devastating storm. Elon tweeted that he could provide 100 megawatts of storage in 100 days or less. This would have been the largest battery in the entire world at that point, and Elon won the bid. He produced the battery within 60 days.
The greatest way to grow your business into an empire is by taking an offensive approach. It’s been proven time and
time again by some of the greatest names in business.
While Darren Hardy was growing up, his father always told him to be the exception. He has taken this philosophy and applied it to his many pursuits in the world of business. Darren has remained at the forefront of success media for over 25 years and is not stopping anytime soon.
The concept of the “Human Firewall” is essentially the people aspect of cybersecurity. While spam filters can block many of the threatening emails you receive, and strong endpoint detection solutions can help stop malware attacks in progress, at the end of the day your security’s greatest strength or biggest vulnerability is the people behind it.
Read our latest blog to learn about some areas of weakness to the Human Firewall and ways you can strengthen it to bring rock solid cybersecurity to your organization.
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Proper Disposal of Devices will Help Protect the Privacy of Your Data
It’s pretty common to lose a file due to a mistake, such as saving over it by accident, or accidentally deleting it. If there’s no backup, we chalk it up to loss and move on.
Naturally, when we are getting rid of our devices, some of us think the way to protect our data is to copy it to a device we are keeping and then delete the data on the old device before parting with it.
The truth is that’s just the start to protecting your data.
Typical deletions are often very easy to reverse if you have access to the drive the data was stored on.
Therefore, if you really want to protect your data after disposing of your device you have to do a secure deletion that makes it far less likely for your data to be extracted. You can even take a more dramatic step and have the physical drive destroyed, which is sometimes appropriate for protecting particularly sensitive data when disposing of a device.
The best place to start is to know what you are storing and where you are storing it. The steps you will take to dispose of your device will vary based on how sensitive it is.
