Be a Bright Tech-Savvy Ostrich and consider the following:
When you have decided:
- How a Cyber event might adversely affect your wellbeing and that of your staff and friends, customers and suppliers
- How you might assess the value of a potential Cyber Event.
- That no amount of care and caution will protect you and your business completely.
It will be time to consider whether or not you can provide solutions to the questions you have raised by engaging with your own staff (resources) or whether seeking help from others is the way forward.
Generally speaking, we think an objective view is always helpful. Such opinions will be based on need and not on budget. We would advise against setting a budget for Cyber security. If the budget is too low you will remain vulnerable. If it is too high – it will be spent whether or not it is truly necessary.
Here are a few pointers that you can manage by yourself – BGi.uk/cyber will help with your Cyber-risk Mangement Visit :
- Educate your staff (and family) to be aware of the ever-present risks that accompany being part of this modern and high pressure age of Cyber Cleverness, Immediate Communication, Social Media and The World Wide Web.
- Teach your staff (and family) how to recognise spoof e-mails and offers that are too good to be true Read More
- Ensure that one and all understand that their personal details are hugely valuable to some people who really should not have access to it!
- Ensure you have a secure system of back up. You don’t want to lose all your precious personal pictures nor those seemingly mundane years of old accounting records which might actually be critical to your wellbeing at some point. And, of course, work in progress.
- Take advice on how to store intellectual property. Consider keeping sections stored in different places with access restricted to only one section per person. It might take 2 or 22 people to unlock all of the data. However it also has to be safe and accessible.
- Take a look at your presence on the web (your online presence) through the eyes of an intruder. Identify the weak points and then fix them. (BGi.uk can help with this.)
- Make sure all your software is regularly and fully backed up.
- Check that your archived and back-up data is retrievable.
- Check the integrity of your staff. Problems at home can change a long standing and trusted member of staff into an unexpected time bomb. Read More
- Check your firewalls
- Consider checking the security of your suppliers and/or customers. If their systems are, from a security perspective, weak and vulnerable – then, probably, so are yours.
- Make sure you send e-mails securely – especially if they contain personal or important information Read More
- Use credit rather than debit cards for online purchases: it is much safer for you
- Use passwords – carefully. Read More
