Originally Published on LastPass.com
Breach Central
Prepare for a breach before it happens
We’ve collected industry best practices, tools, and resources to help keep you, and your business one step ahead of the next data breach.
There’s no finish line when it comes to your online security.
Cybercrime is estimated to cost businesses more than $2 trillion by 2019 . And when surveyed in 2017, 4 out of 5 security leaders said it was likely their enterprise would experience a breach that year . It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when the next big data breach occurs. Are you prepared?.
Whether you are in charge of your company’s security or just in charge of your own household, there are steps you can take to stay safe. With the increased frequency of breaches in the last few years, it’s important to evaluate how you operate when it comes to security, and optimize those practices. The resources on this page can help you protect yourself before a security incident.
Tips to keep your business safe
Whether you’re running a small business or leading a team within a larger organization, security is likely a concern for you. Here are four easy steps you can follow to get started.
Educate your team: Employees are the weakest link when it comes to passwords. Invest in education about internet safety, reinforce the risks of weak security habits and instill good habits on topics such as password hygiene, downloading content, and sharing information online.
Don’t click that! Whether it’s while perusing websites or checking email, employees need to be aware of suspicious activity and links. One way to prepare your team for phishing attacks is to send out fake phishing emails. Like a planned fire drill, but for internet security.
Create strong password policies: According to the 2017 Verizon Data Breach Report, 81% of confirmed breaches are due to weak, reused, or stolen passwords. Knowing this, password management is likely the easiest and quickest way for you to make a positive impact on your organization’s security. Implement an enterprise password manager like LastPass to store passwords and autofill credentials.
Use strong passwords: Train employees to use a password generator to create strong, unique passwords for their accounts. With LastPass remembering passwords for them, employees can create strong passwords without the fear of forgetting them.
Tips to keep yourself safe
With big data breaches in the news so often, we all want to do more to protect ourselves online. While it might feel like there’s nothing you can do that will help, there are several easy strategies to make yourself less vulnerable.
Unique account, unique password: Creating strong and unique passwords for every account is the best first step to protecting yourself against a breach. Use a password generator to create passwords for you. Unique passwords ensure that a breach at one website doesn’t result in a stolen account at another.
Protect your email: If a hacker has access to your email account, they can use password resets at most sites to get into other accounts. Consider creating an alternate email address for online signups. And be sure to turn on multi-factor authentication for your email account. That way someone will need to get your email credentials and have access to your phone in order to truly get into your email account.
Give fake answers to security questions: You know those silly security questions companies ask you so you can “prove” who you are? Don’t give real answers. Use the password generator to create random answers that you can then store in LastPass. Just add it to the “notes” section for any website login stored in LastPass.