Some ways to improve your cyber security

A chip error?
July 17, 2018
Chip cards are finally catching on in the US
EMV may finally be catching on in the United States
July 31, 2018
A chip error?
July 17, 2018
Chip cards are finally catching on in the US
EMV may finally be catching on in the United States
July 31, 2018
Show all
Help to keep his online transactions safe by practicing good cyber security methods

Help to keep his online transactions safe by practicing good cyber security methods

The EMV chips have taken a huge bite out of credit card fraud. That is great news certainly but not all of the news is great. 2017 was the first year in which online fraud surpassed physical fraud. The EMV chip offers no safeguards or protections for purchases over the Internet. There is no magic piece of technology that can be implemented or installed that will wipe away online credit card fraud but there are some things that you can do for your business to help reduce it.

If you have an e-commerce site or any Internet facing portal there is a chance that someone could break in that way using login credentials. A simple way to reduce this risk is to set up Two Factor Authentication (2FA) or multifactor authentication. What this does is take the usual login credentials (username and password) and adds another step to it. It adds something else that only the user should know usually in the form of a security question or something physical to scan so that an identity thief would have to know something about the person in order to complete this thereby keeping that account safer. In many cases this only adds a few seconds to the login process and is becoming common all over the Internet.

Your cyber security is not something that you should set and forget. The landscape of this is changing almost daily. New updates are issued and need to be installed or else they will not be effective thereby creating vulnerabilities that can be exploited. The overall security should also be checked regularly to make sure that everything is working the way it should. The safer you keep your business the safer your customer’s data will be.

Completing regular backups of data is also a good idea. Ransomware is on the rise and targets vulnerable businesses by hijacking their data and holding it for ransom. At the same time a hard drive can fail meaning your business could be one drive failure away from a very messy situation. By doing regular backups the damage that either of these scenarios can cause can be minimized. Ransomware can be overcome by wiping the computers and starting them over and adding the restored data in. This can be costly but it is nowhere near the cost of paying a cyber criminal to get your data back. Should a hard drive fail the data can be restored from the backup and business can continue on as usual.

Keeping your businesses data safe is one of the most important things that any business owner or merchant can do. That is why PCI compliance is such a big deal. These security ideas are some of the most simple things that anyone can do to help keep their data safe. You may not have an IT pro on your staff but there are many IT pros that would be able to help, you just have to get serious about it and get one.