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We’ve said it before and again and again and again: Hackers do not fight fair. They don’t care that tax season is in full swing—they don’t care that you are a two-person shop or sole proprietor. Actually, those are the qualities they look for in a cyber attack victim.
Malicious hackers more often go after employees who are:
Why? Because those two qualities mean that their victim is less likely to pay close attention to what they’re clicking on, browsing or responding to. And, a smaller-sized business or accounting firm is less likely to have the security defenses in place to catch a ransomware attack before it has the chance to wreak havoc.
Don’t let cyber attackers get away with this any longer. It’s your actions every single day that defend or allow a cyber breach to occur.
Here are 5 ways that you—an employee at any-sized business or firm—can reduce cyber attack risk, protect your data and therefore: protect yourself.
With a little education, we believe most of these breaches would’ve been unsuccessful. Make sure you’re taking the required security awareness training your IT department sends out (and pay attention to it!).
If you have a difficult time remembering passwords, try using a password management system. This article by PCmag.com lists the top 11 password managers to use in 2022.
Once in a while, a malicious email may slip through even the best security programs. My rule of thumb? I don’t trust any email without taking a closer look.
“If companies just [implemented multi-factor authentication], they would be exponentially more secure…”
Brian Grayek, Virtual Chief Information Security Officer, Cosant Cyber Security
So—if multi-factor authentication is such obvious protection, why don’t more businesses implement it? According to Brian Grayek, either “A) They don’t know. B) They think it’s high-cost and it’s too hard to do.” ¹
Simply put: It’s not. It’s not complicated from an infrastructure setup perspective. And from a user perspective, it adds about three extra seconds to my normal login procedures, and I was able to set it up myself at home.
Tell your IT guys to implement it for an all-around, more secure workstation. Or enlist the help of managed service providers.
Duo—Cisco’s user-friendly, multi-factor authentication product—is a component in our QuickBooks Desktop hosting and Secure Workstation packages. The simple and effective method ensures that data and information can only be accessed by the user who is supposed to be accessing it.
We believe in Cisco’s product so much that we’ve implemented it for our employees, too.
Maintaining data privacy is the responsibility of every employee, regardless of their title.
By following the tips included above (and leveraging cloud technology to make maintaining your business’s data even easier), you are doing your part to keep data secure.
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