Whether big or small, charities are at just as much risk of becoming a target for cybercrime, especially since they have a lot of sensitive information and assets to protect. The only difference between a charity and a business, however, is that charities don’t always have the resources to protect themselves.
While charities may find it difficult to devote time and money to ensure the protection of their online data, it has never been a more important time to make this a priority. To help you juggle reduced resources and increase your cyber security, here are 4 quick tips to get you started.
1. Have Good Technical Support to Hand
Good technical support is one of the most important things you need to have to ensure that you are protected against cybercrime. Why? Because who better to ensure the smooth and secure running of your IT systems than the experts? Many charities cannot afford the latest equipment and software, so it is important that you have professionals in-house or that you get help elsewhere.
2. Update and Back Up Regularly
All of us are guilty of clicking later on our notifications for updates, but what we don’t know is that many cyber attacks are actually through exploiting these applications that are supposed to be protecting our systems. Long story short, make sure that all of your systems and applications are kept up to date, as these programmes will have much fewer vulnerabilities to exploit.
Another way to protect your data and reduce the impact of an attack should one arise, is to encrypt and backup all of your information regularly. Not only will this ensure that your critical data is not lost for good, but it will also be worthless to someone if they can’t make sense of it.
3. Use a Password Manager Programme
A great way of protecting masses of sensitive and confidential data is to have strong passwords that are changed frequently. The best way to do this is to use a Password Manager Programme such as LastPass or RoboForm. These programmes allow you to create the strongest of passwords which they then save and encrypt for you, as well as allowing you to update them easily. This increases your security drastically as you can have strong passwords that are different for each programme and system and it remembers them all for you!
4. Implement a Security Process
An efficient and effective security process is essential to have in any organisation, especially as cyber crimes and scams are on the rise. From employee awareness and training to outlining how they should report a suspicion and respond, it is important that the whole team knows how to prevent and manage cyber attacks should they occur. As well as a policy that needs to be enforced, it is also a good idea to keep up to date on the latest types of scams and attacks and to have an incident response team who is responsible for responding to a crisis.
With these 4 quick cyber security tips, you can ensure that you are protecting your organisation and the sensitive information you hold to the best of your ability. If in doubt, swot up on relevant legislation and compliance with the Data Protection Act or seek a professional opinion.
