Is Your Email Address Safe? Cyber Security For Small Businesses

by Ayaz Ahmad Online Business Analyst

Small business owners have to keep up with everything going on in their business all the time. They never stop learning. Whether it's new tools for marketing or better ways to do things, technology is driving change, and it's happening at a rate that's almost exponential. As a result, hacker threats are also changing at a rate that is very close to an exponential rate. Just like it's hard to keep up with the big changes in technology, it's even harder to keep up with the ways hackers change their methods. Small business owners should make cybersecurity a top priority because of this. But because technology changes so quickly, many business owners don't have time to make a good cybersecurity plan. "Failing to plan is planning to fail," as the saying goes.

Because of this, this and other articles I write will be about cybersecurity problems that small businesses face. Business owners need to know that data breaches from places like linkedin.com and myspace.com pose real risks. More specifically, how hackers use the information they get from these holes.

When a well-known company has a data breach, most people who have accounts there will only change their password for that company. For example, when 360 million email addresses and 427 million passwords were stolen from Myspace in May 2016, I wasn't worried. Since I no longer used Myspace, I didn't do anything. But that same month, when Linkedin was hacked, I changed my password. I did things differently because I didn't know how hackers used the information.

Most of us know that hackers use data breaches to sell emails and passwords on the dark web. Most of us don't know, though, that hackers use the email addresses and passwords from institutions whose data has been stolen on other websites. In other words, hackers could buy email and password combinations for Myspace.com and then try to use these combinations on the websites of banks. The hackers think that the email's owner will use the same password for more than one site. Then, they will use these combinations to write a script that will try to log in to the most popular institutions. With a half a billion email/password combinations, all they need is a small percentage to hit to be successful.

Cybersecurity Plan to Protect Your Email and Passwords

First, I'd suggest finding out if your email and passwords have been stolen. It doesn't take long at all to check.

The second step is to change all of your passwords. It's important to have passwords that are unique, hard to guess, and regularly changed. DO NOT use the same password for more than one site just because you can't remember all of them.

Step 3 is to get a password manager, which can be paid for or free. A password manager is a piece of software that helps you keep track of and remember the passwords for all of your online accounts. The user only has to remember one password that is unique to them. You could also start using the password manager extension for Chrome. Google lets you come up with unique passwords and lets you "From the main Chrome toolbar on your desktop, you can see all of your saved passwords, credit cards, addresses, and other information. You can also save all your passwords and export them to a.csv file at any time "

Business leaders sign up for different websites all the time so they can run their own businesses. But every time they sign up for something new, they put themselves at risk. It is impossible to get rid of all risks, but it is possible to deal with them.

This leads to the fourth step, which is to work with your Managed IT Service Provider to make sure that your employees have enough security. MSPs can set up security profiles that are meant to reduce the risk of security holes and then keep an eye on these profiles to see if the security is getting worse over time. They can also do scans of employees on the dark web to find possible risks.