Protecting Yourself from Attacks Online

Everything you need to know about encryption, e-mail authentication, multi-factor authentication, and more.

We’ve spent most of this month detailing some the biggest cybersecurity threats out there as part of our new “Cybersecurity 101 for Small Businesses” series. This is our attempt to help familiarize you with how a thief might infiltrate your system.

In today’s post, we’ll be looking more closely at the ways you can protect yourself and your business and why putting these defenses in place is critical.

From phishing attacks to malware and identity theft, it’s not enough to just know about these types of scams. You need a rock solid, disaster-proof defense against them.

Encryption

This process is used to convert information into a code that can only be read by a computer system and has become a must in many industries where data privacy is essential. Depending on the company, they may encrypt data on a server so that if information is ever stolen, it cannot be decoded or, they might offer “end to end” encryption which means no matter if the data is sent, received or stored, it cannot be read. This method isn’t fail proof however, as it could still be vulnerable in an endpoint attack.

Email Authentication

To help curb some of the rampant phishing that happens via e-mail, authentication is used to verify that a sender and recipient are in fact the right intended targets receiving a message. For the authentication to be possible, a parameter of standards and rules is set at the domain level for all e-mails to meet before being pushed through.

Multi-factor Authentication

This is a newer method of thwarting attacks that’s been adopted by more businesses to help curb fraud. Whenever someone tries to access an account they must prove who they are by offering additional proof. You see this a lot today when logging into a bank account for example. A user, even if entering the correct log-in credentials, may have to enter a short code that’s been texted to their phone or emailed to them to prove it’s actually them trying to log-in. This offers greater peace of mind as typically a device or a possession the actual account owner has with them will be required to authenticate.

It’s a big, scary world out there in the World Wide Web. While this technology has been around for sometime now and has matured over the years, there are still new emerging dangers that plague us each time we connect. Protect your business now and gain greater peace of mind.

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Protect Yourself from Attacks Online

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