The holiday shopping season is here, and while millions of Americans will be looking for the best deals the internet has to offer, cyber criminals will be hard at work looking to target online shoppers. The holiday shopping season is a prime opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of unsuspecting shoppers through fake websites, malicious links, and even fake charities. Their goal is simple: get a hold of your personal and financial information to compromise your data, insert malicious software, steal your identity and take your money. 

This is the most important time of year to protect yourself, your company and your employees.

Keeping software updated, thinking before you click on suspicious links, using strong passwords, and turning on multi-factor authentication are the basics of what we call “cyber hygiene” and will drastically improve your online safety.  

Here are 4 common sense ways to protect yourself online.  

• Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) on your accounts and make it much less likely you’ll get hacked.
• Keep ANY/ALL of your software updated. In fact, turn on automatic updates.  
• Think before you click. Most successful cyber-attacks start with a phishing email.  
• Use strong passwords, and ideally a password manager to generate and store unique passwords. 

Here’s a short video produced by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It’s a great little reminder. Please share it with your team.