Cybercrime: How can we protect ourselves?

Cybercrime: How can we protect ourselves?

Welcome to our final article on Cybercrime.  If you’ve not already seen the others start there. The first, “What is Cybercrime and how can we prevent it?”, the second “Cybercrime, why is it on the rise?” are available on our website.

Through these articles, we’ve explored cybercrime to understand what it is and how, through its low risk nature and accessibility without too much equipment, it’s becoming more prevalent.  We’re now going to look in a little more detail at how we can better protect ourselves.

Firstly, as discussed in an interesting article by Kaperski in March last year, financial fraud can be protected against through existing technologies, which by definition means, if correct guidance is followed by all employees, security measures and protocols are kept up to date, then your company should be as safe as possible against financial fraud.  But how easy is this in practice.  How many of your employees use the same password in work as they do for their personal e-mail or facebook accounts.  How many have their work’s e-mail or cloud log-ins on their personal, unsecured mobile phones?  If a staff member lost a set of keys for the building with the company logo on, there would be consequences.  Would the same actions be taken by the company if their mobile phone was stolen?

Ryan Polk, policy advisor for the internet society writes an interesting article about the lazy person’s guide to internet security.  It’s all about slowing down and taking the measures we generally skip through really quickly, whenever we go online.  Read, before agreeing to the privacy statement, don’t re-use the same password on all work-related items because it’s easier to remember, and two stage verification doesn’t actually take that much longer.  But the majority of users skip these steps and this is exactly where and how we are at risk.

Here’s the list of priorities he discusses:

• Buy privacy respecting connected devices.
• Update your devices and its applications.
• Turn on strong encryption.
• Review the permissions on your mobile devices.
• Review the privacy settings on your social media and store accounts.
• Boost the privacy protections on your favourite browser.
• Turn on two factor authentication.
• Stop reusing passwords.

These are all very simple and straightforward measures to protecting your online security and they will all help to protect you from attacks, simply through being less vulnerable.

The security of financial transactions is less straightforward and modern technologies such as blockchain are being encouraged.  Protection against complex and targeted attacks needs the sharing of intelligence within the financial sector and it really depends on new and customized security technology, as written in Kapersky’s March 2017 article.

You may ask yourselves why is it that an IFA in the Isle of Man is so interested in Cybercrime?  We have dedicated Commercial Insurance Brokers offering a Cyber Insurance solution.  The victims of cybercrime aren’t just the end user, but also the professionals and businesses along the way, who through very minor ignorance and negligence from employees or an unforeseen fault in a company’s IT infrastructure could be facing very severe and expensive consequences.  Along with recent Cyber Security guidance issued by IOMFSA and GDPR, it is essential that Cyber Security forms part of your company insurance policy.  Download our cyber crime brochure here if you’d like information about how we can help, or contact Peter O’Donnell if you’d like to take action to start protecting yourself or your business right away.

01624 639450. Peter.O’Donnell@macgroup.im

References:

https://otalliance.org/initiatives/internet-things

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/how-the-financial-industry-reacts-to-cyberthreats/6610/#mktoForm_10582

https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/01/lazy-persons-guide-better-online-privacy/