In today’s digital world, it is not an option to ignore your company’s security. It should be the primary focus of your operations. Business threats come in many shapes like theft, break-ins, vandalism and the all-encompassing data breach. A lack of digital security could mean serious damage to your business. To protect your business, employees, customers and all the data, you need to establish security protocols.
Some of the most common security mistakes are preventable with very basic cyber security training. I’ve listed 5 major digital marketing missteps you might encounter below.
1. Never Changing Old and Weak Passwords
Password cracking is remarkably easy, in particular for advanced hackers. Hackers could have been stealing your data for months without noticing. They might publish or sell your data online and it is impossible to restore. Hackers may try to obtain your social media account passwords to unlock information about you that they need in order to get to the real valuable data.
According to John Lewis, IT Security, Risk Management 73% of online accounts are guarded by duplicated passwords. This is understandable because nobody wants to remember several passwords. But, if one site’s data is being compromised, your personal data is out in the wild. With a little social engineering, the hackers can get access to retail, banking, medical and other websites that store your sensitive data.
To prevent that this happens to your firm and employees, have your employees change their passwords routinely. Make sure that they create strong and lengthy passwords that contains a random mix of numbers, lower- and uppercase letters and symbols.
2. No Data Loss Prevention System in Place
In today’s digital world, it isn’t easy to keep sensitive information secure from vulnerabilities and theft. There are various programs that can access and read email data such as attachments, stored on your device. These software tools can even display or read the attachments or messages.
Some reports have shown indications that only 50% of the emails are encrypted, while many people are sending credit card and social security numbers via email. As an employer, you should train your employees on security precautions. Your employees must be aware what not to sent via an insecure email channel.
Many programs like Dropbox, Box and Google One Drive and hundreds of other applications allow the data to be sent from a network and stored on an employee’s personal account.
There are no business owners that allow their employees to make copies of the company’s data and store somewhere. Yet, this happens thousands of times per day. This is why companies need to implement some form of a “Data Loss Prevention System” – to protect sensitive data and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
3. Using Unencrypted Devices
For many modern businesses, data theft is an uncomfortable reality. Stolen laptops, compromised cloud storage accounts, data loss caused by dissatisfied employees and lost or stolen modern devices such as tablets and smartphones, which store loads of mission-critical data. Any of these examples may cause serious disruptions and real damage to any business. For example, losing vital trade secrets can set you back months or even years.
According to PandaLabs, in 2017 the total number of new malware was up to 285,000 new malware samples every day. There is not one filter to catch them all, so you must have a series of filters to protect your business. The best way of dealing with this is to implement encryption across all devices you use such as an old Windows XP desktop PC but also the new computers your business possesses. Also, smartphones used by your sales employees in the field should be encrypted.
4. Customer Relationship Management
Forming good relationships with your customers is all about building trust. Make sure you install SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocols on your website in order to ensure that sensitive information is not stored or transferred in plain text format; instead, it will be encrypted. Also, never store customer data that you don’t need and delete data it as soon as it is no longer useful. Enforce strict data security policies for your staff.
By employing the latest encryption standards, even experienced hackers that can intercept your communications won’t be able to read encrypted (unreadable) text.
5. Not Testing Your Own Security Systems
The number of devices at organizations is growing very fast. All these devices require regular testing to check for vulnerabilities and weak points. Every access point could be a potential threat and has its own set of problems and risks. You have to discover them before someone outside your organization does.
You might consider a form of user feedback, that allows external parties to report potential issues. Feedback helps you highlight problems you would have never discovered otherwise. The same strategy also applies to testing your own software funnels and other online connection ports of your network router, for example.
Bill here from PixelPrivacy.com. My blog is all about making the world of online security accessible to everyone. I pride myself in writing guides that I’m certain even my own mom could read! Be sure to head over to my blog if you’re interested in keeping your private information just that: Private!
The post 5 Major Digital Marketing Security Mistakes You Should Avoid At All Costs appeared first on Digital Media News & Training.
No comments:
Post a Comment