Do you want to protect your company’s data? Your confidential documents? Protect yourself from cyber-attacks? Discover our advice.
Use an efficient computer equipment
The first step to protect yourself from cyber-attacks is to equip yourself with efficient and regularly updated computer equipment.
Our advice:
- Keep up to date with the suggested software updates by following the terms of use that come with most devices.
- Use your browser’s phishing filter: Most existing browsers offer a phishing warning feature. These features help keep you on your toes.
- Use spam filtering software or the automatic spam classification features of your inbox. While these filters are not comprehensive, they do help reduce the amount of spam.
Get a reliable digital identity
Create a reliable domain name
The domain name is the foundation of a company’s digital identity. It is the part after the “@” in emails and the part after “www.” in website addresses.
Choose a secure messaging system
Email is one of the most used means of communication in a company. It is also regularly the subject of cyber-attacks, particularly in terms of identity theft or fraud.
Our advice:
To protect yourself, make sure that the chosen access provider is up to date with the current security standards.
Fight against spam
Spam, also known as junk mail or spam, is unsolicited electronic communication. It ranges from marketing abuse to phishing, which consists of disguising an e-mail as a message from a bank, a popular shopping site or any other service, in order to obtain the recipient’s personal data. Spam can therefore represent a real danger for your company.
Secure your website
Our advice:
- It is highly recommended to create a website with “https” security.
- In addition, to ensure the best possible security, it is necessary to regularly review the security settings of your website and make the necessary updates.
Protect your company’s sensitive information
The protection measures taken for your documents must be proportional to the confidentiality and sensitivity of the data contained.
Our advice:
- Mark the information according to its level of sensitivity: to evaluate the solutions needed to properly protect your data, it is important to mark them. This marking is the result of a risk analysis that must allow you to protect your most important documents.
- Lock access to confidential documents: several word processing software programs offer the possibility of securing documents with a code. The creation of this code allows you to limit access to sensitive documents to authorized persons within your company and will give you a first level of protection against external attacks. If you wish to implement more secure solutions for your strategic data, it is also possible to use encryption solutions or access via a smart card with a digital certificate. In general, we advise you to establish a clear and regularly evaluated security system.
Make regular backups: To protect yourself from hardware incidents, data manipulation errors or attacks, it is highly recommended to set up a backup plan for your information.
Make your employees aware of cyber security
Remind your employees of the precautions to be taken against the various methods of hacking. any methods of data hacking exist and represent a threat to your company. Beyond the tools to put in place, as a company manager you can protect yourself against many of these threats for free by having the right reflexes, as well as by raising the awareness of your employees.
Our advice (non-exhaustive list):
- Remind your employees not to open messages of dubious origin or form, it could be a ransomware.
- Remind your employees to be wary of suspicious-looking attachment extensions (e.g. .pif; .com; .bat; .exe; .vbs; .lnk…), which may contain malicious code.
- Remind us to be vigilant about the URL links that every Internet user is likely to click on. One letter or character too many or too few can lead to a completely different website. It is important to type URLs directly on the address bar as well as links beginning with “https”.
- Insist on the importance of not connecting a USB key found by chance, it may be trapped!
- For the head of the company or employees with access to administrator accounts, it is advisable to use a user account rather than an administrator account. The administrator of a computer has a number of privileges on it, such as performing certain actions or accessing certain files hidden on a computer. Therefore, use a user account whenever possible, especially for daily tasks.
Plan training for you and your employees
If you want to go further, it can be useful to train yourself and your employees on cybersecurity.
