Now that the nice weather has arrived, it seems like a good time to relax and go fishing, or, should I say, “phishing.” You can hardly go a day without reading yet another headline about a major cybersecurity breach. This subject has clearly garnered a lot of attention in the news. Given the prevalence of these incidents, we ALL need to think about our role when it comes to cybersecurity, and the basic steps we can take to minimize the chance of falling victim to a cyber-attack:
1) Think of yourself as a human firewall — you are the first line of defense when it comes to a cybersecurity breach. Look for the red flags when opening emails:
Pause, and think before you open email attachments or click on links.
2) Take advantage of multi-factor authentication, or MFA. If MFA is not available for critical websites or applications that access your network, you should be asking why not?” Even where MFA is available, however, not all businesses are taking advantage of this security opportunity. The recent Colonial Pipeline case drives home the importance of using MFA: Upon closer inspection, hackers disrupted the Colonial Pipeline by cracking a single user’s password.
3) Create complex and unique passwords for each website and change your passwords periodically. Cyber criminals are aware that people use the same password repeatedly. When one company gets hacked and your credentials are stolen, those same hackers reuse the passwords on other sites. Fortunately, many websites require you to create complex and unique passwords and force you to update your passwords regularly.
4) Use security images and expiring email links. Just yesterday, I was resetting a password for a website, and had to input a correct Captcha generated code to complete the process. It took me a few extra seconds, but I felt more confident as I later typed my credit card information into the site.
As a vendor providing pay-as-you-go billing services to workers compensation insurance companies, cybersecurity earns a lot of attention at InsurePay. Want to learn more about pay-as-you-go billing and the security of our InsurePay application? Contact sales@insurepay.com.
