Everyday Work Habits that Put Your Data and Records at Risk

There are so many ways hackers can gain access to your data these days, but as awareness grows most employers are getting smarter about keeping their risk to a minimum. Despite their best efforts, there are still several common work habits that still put data and records at risk. Here are 3 bad habits that you should work hard to break.

Use Passwords that Are Easy to Remember (and Guess)

Hacker bots are very, very good at looking through the dictionary to find the right combination of letters that a user would choose for their password. As most account users are thinking along very similar lines when creating their password initially, they are falling into a cybersecurity trap. The new best practice is to make a password that is both difficult to guess but easy to remember. An example of this is the use of a phrase rather than a word. To shorten up the password, but maintain the complexity, use the first letter or number of each word to create a seemingly random but easily recalled password.

Use the Same Password for Personal and Work Accounts

If you use the same password across multiple accounts, you are not alone but you are putting your corporate data at risk. Sadly, the use of easily guessed passwords is still one of the top entry points for hackers to gain access to personal or sensitive information. If your employees are guilty of using the same password for their corporate accounts as they do for their personal accounts, you are leaving your company exposed and vulnerable to the same level of security that their personal accounts support. Which, in most cases, is certainly not up to the same level of even basic corporate security guard-rails.

Consider the recent high-profile hacks like Dropbox and LinkedIn. These corporate attacks were made possible because users had the same password on their personal accounts as their professional ones. It’s not enough anymore to have just one strong password. Your employees need to be one step ahead of the bots and cybercriminals that are focusing 100% on how to gain access to your system. And that means more and better passwords.

Accessing the Network from an Unsecure Device

Accessing email or a corporate network from a personal device or an unsecured internet hotspot can lead to big problems it terms of data security. Once hackers find an easy way in, it doesn’t matter how strong your security is. Your data is vulnerable. Support your employees by providing them with a strong corporate security policy. Have employees use their password only on secure devices, and not access the corporate network from unsecure Wi-Fi connections, or computers at an internet café or library.

For more examples of how your team can be safer online, connect with the experts at Happy Faces Records Management or learn more about our Data and Records Management Services here.

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