Cybercrime

Although you rely on your IT company to provide advice on how to make your network secure and to ensure that systems are managed and software constantly patched, organisations must take some responsibility and internal precautions.

Sophisticated protection can be undone by careless employees. A great analogy is trying to protect your home from the bad guys. You can believe that you are safe when you have reinforced concrete walls, bars on the windows, triple locks on the doors, a clever alarm system and CCTV surveillance cameras. This protection is completely undermined when the bad guy walks up and rings the front door bell and a member of your family opens the door and invites him in.

In other words, a company’s employees can be weakest link in the effort to thwart cybercrime. Few now fall for the scam where they offer you a share of $20 million dollars which has been left by someone in Nigeria. But cybercriminals are always one step ahead of the security firms and their methods are becoming very sophisticated.
Here is some brief advice that may save some grief:
Start with strong passwords and change them on a regular basis.
Don’t click on links before inspecting the internet address
Don’t open attachments unless you are 100% confident that these are genuine (an executable file can be dressed up to look like a PDF)
Most of all be incredibly distrustful.

Just to show you how dangerous the Internet is, there are 5 new malware programs discovered every second.