6 Ways To Stop Cybercriminals Breaking Your Heart

Deceit is often the end to a relationship. And IT security professionals know all too well the difficulties of dealing with a world of deception – not only caused by cyber criminals and their increasingly sophisticated tactics, but also by privileged insiders.

As more data moves into the cloud and across multiple devices, the risks of betrayal (in the form of a data breach) can include ruined reputation, revenue and customer loss, damaged intellectual property, litigation and the list goes on.

Always use protection

Courtesy of enterprise IT security tech provider, Blue Coat, here are six tips on how businesses can protect their IT (and their hearts) this Valentine’s Day.

1. Play hard to get – Always use strong passwords and never reuse a previous password.

2. Know what you’re getting yourself into – There are 10 top level domains (TLDs) most associated with suspicious websites and most orgainsations don’t know which ones they are or how to avoid them. According to Blue Coat research, they are .zip, .review, .country, .kim, .cricket, .science, .work, .party, .gq (Equatorial Guinea) and .link

3. Be wary of a ménage à trois – Some third party vendors, such as health insurance providers and HVAC suppliers, may have access to your corporate networks. Attackers can use these as an indirect route to strike your systems.

4. Watch out for sneaking around – Hackers can use SSL/TLS encrypted traffic to mask their behaviour as it can blind security mechanisms.

5. …and someone looking through your phone – Spyware is one of the most common mobile malware threats, according to Blue Coat’s 2015 State of Mobile Malware Report.

6. Because trust has to be earned – Employees often use Shadow IT cloud apps without approval. A recent report shows that organisations are unaware that 26 percent of documents stored in cloud apps are broadly shared.