Keeping your data safe and protected from outside intruders has long been a priority of businesses, but it’s increasingly critical for consumers and individuals to keep their sensitive personal information safe and secure.
An effective defence starts with comprehensive review of your digital security infrastructure.
Here we selected ten tips that will help you keep your data safe for your business and home.
1. Encrypt your data. Just because a laptop is password protected, that doesn’t mean that the files are necessarily safe from unauthorized access. That’s why we recommend encrypting your laptop.
Encryption is one of the most important methods for providing data security, especially for end-to-end protection of data transmitted across networks. Simplified, encryption is the method by which any other type of data is converted from a readable form to an encoded version that can only be decoded provided that you have a decryption key.
2. Backup your data. This creates a copy of your data so that if a device is lost, stolen, or compromised, you don’t also lose your important information. Make sure that the backup is encrypted, as well.
3. Anti-malware protection. Always keep your computer security up to date with anti-virus and anti-spyware software and a good firewall. No one can predict the constantly shifting nature of security threats. But what you can do is ensure that your devices are working hard to supplement your cybersecurity defences.
4. Secure your wireless network by using a firewall. Firewalls prevent unauthorized internet users from accessing private networks connected to the internet. All messages entering or leaving the network must pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria.
5. Make your old computers’ hard drives unreadable. When disposing of an old laptop/pc take the hard drive out and destroy it with a magnet, hammer or by using software to wipe the disk clean. This will prevent anyone from ever reading your personal data.
6. Keep your system up to date. Always check for new updates and enable automatic updates. This along with the anti-malware protection reduces your vulnerability to scammers.
7. Don’t use the same passwords for all your accounts. Create strong passwords and change them often. If you need to safely store passwords, look for a secure password manager.
8. Beware of public Wi-Fi. Most home Wi-Fi connections are encrypted. Some public Wi-Fi connections are not. This means you’re at risk of people monitoring your online activity. Ensure you’ve turned on your firewall, and have up-to-date malware protection, or you could run into problems.
9. Be conscious of privacy settings. Most apps offer privacy settings for users. This gives you the freedom to know how much and what kind of information is shared. Always choose the least amount of data sharing.
10. Be cautious with phishing emails and don’t click on links that seem suspicious. Phishing can be described as any website, online service, phone call, text message or email that poses as a company or brand you recognise. Phishing attacks are generally undertaken on a large scale – a big net is cast to try to catch as many victims as possible. See ‘’Protect your company against phishing scams’’ for a better understanding of phishing scams.
Bonus: Always be conscious of the information you’re sharing on social media. They only know what you’re telling them… on Facebook.
For more information just give us a call at 01-4975562 or email us at sales@motherboard.ie.
