In a recent poll on pembinavalleyonline.com, nearly 80% of our community showed that they are concerned about their personal online privacy and security.
Curt Dueck, president of SolutionsIT helped to explore essential practices that people and businesses can put into practice to protect themselves, digitally speaking.
Embrace Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
According to Dueck, multi-factor authentication, also called two-factor authentication is a way for a user to access their data, but rather than relying on a single password, they present two or more pieces of proof (or factors) to authenticate that the correct user is trying to access the data.
Similar to providing personal identification at a border or a restaurant.
Dueck urges people to consider using multi-factor authentication to protect themselves, "Especially for really critical things like your banking... Unfortunately, statistically most surveys say 80% of our passwords are bad. Like just really easy to guess.”
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Stay Informed with Banking Notifications
Dueck emphasized the importance of staying alert with banking notifications: “Almost every online banking service has notifications. So just thinking about getting a notification if somebody’s logging in or getting a notification if there’s an amount of money leaving [your] account.”
For Dueck, banking notifications are a great way to help a person stay alert and inform them if they happen to become compromised.
Utilize Password Managers
With a staggering 80% of our passwords being weak, or easily guessable, Curt advises, “Rather than remember all your passwords or put them onto a piece of paper... have a manager that fills in the password for you and keeps track of them all.”
Dueck recommended some password managers such as Keeper or 1Password to help keep passwords secure and safe.
Regularly update Software
One of the more overlooked aspects of cybersecurity, Dueck says, is keeping your software up to date.
“When your computer says it needs to do an update, when your phone says it needs to do an update... they’re plugging holes that they didn’t know existed.”
He continued, “70% of business attacks start off at hygiene... known vulnerabilities that have been patched that just haven’t been installed.”
Stay safe
MFA, notifications, password managers, and updating software are all strong ways to stay safe on a personal level in the digital space, but when looking to protect a larger entity such as a business, different strategies are required.