Keeping your data safe is crucial, both for protecting your clients and your company’s reputation.
One of the biggest threats to data security is the way that files are transferred. Making sure your employees are secretly and properly transferring files is not only a good idea, it’s a necessity.
Learn some essential computer security training tops for employees to make sure your data stays safe, and find out how implementing these standards can help you ward off the biggest threats to your file transfer security.
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Keep Your Passwords Complex
Passwords are one of the biggest vulnerabilities in your cybersecurity protections. You must have a strong password to protect your information.
The days of being able to use ‘password123’ are long gone. Even hackers with the most basic tools can crack simple passwords. You need a complicated password to keep your information secure.
You can use some of these things in a password to make it more difficult for hackers to crack them:
- A string or unrelated numbers
- Upper and lowercase letters
- Symbols
- Eight characters minimum
- Words that aren’t in the dictionary
A common mistake is using the same password for multiple sites. If a hacker can guess this password, they have access to all those sites, making it impossible to keep your information safe.
Make sure that you’re assigning a unique password to all of the sites and accounts that your employees access. Offer training on why strong passwords are critical for secure file sharing.
Update Your Passwords
There are two ways to keep passwords safe. Have complex passwords and update them regularly. Once you have chosen a password, you should update it every 90 days.
It’s possible for cyber criminals to have access to your network for quite a while before they are detected. In fact, they can be there for months before anyone realizes.
However, by changing your passwords frequently, you’ll make it harder for hackers to access your accounts and stay in there. Stay vigilant with your passwords, and you can deter even very advanced hackers.
Stop Sending Files Via Email
Another security training tip for your employees to have is to avoid sending files via email. Unfortunately, when you send files via email, you have no way of protecting them from upload to download by another party.
Emails don’t offer enough security for important data, making it easy for a hacker to intercept your email in transit and access your files.
Even if your file does arrive at its destination safely, that doesn’t mean that it will stay secure forever.
When you send a file via email, four copies of the file are created. One is in your outbox, one is in the sending mail server, one is in the receiving mail server, and one is the copy that arrives in the inbox of the recipient. There are four copies vulnerable to hackers.
Use more secure methods to share files, such as the cloud, to avoid exposing your information to would-be hackers.
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