Cyber hygiene is a more elegant way to describe staying safe online. Unfortunately, no amount of software or hardware can protect your system from attempts of ransomware attacks, data breaches, and other threats 100% of the time. Fortunately, there are a few steps your school, business, or organization can take to stay safe online.

How to Practice Safe Cyber Hygiene

Here are ten actions you can take now to improve online safety across your organization. 

1. Use a password manager and create long, random passwords for the websites you manage. We recommend LastPass for personal sites and OneLogin for business accounts. 
2. Use a PIN for account recovery questions before or after your answer. For example, if your security question is “What’s your favorite color,” your answer could be BLUE7748.
3. Keep all machines and applications up to date. If you have several devices, our team at Concensus can help monitor and keep applications up-to-date automatically.
4. Keep a running inventory of all of your network’s hardware and software. 
5. Backup important data in more than one place. We recommend backing up local files to both a local disk and the cloud. If your organization needs cloud software, we can help with our Concensus cloud platform.
6. Create an incident response plan covering what to during and after a hack or security breach.
7. If your systems are hacked, inform any third parties or vendors and your internal teams.
8. Discourage the use of public Wi-Fi by ensuring every employee, staff member, or student has access to your private Wi-Fi- network.
9. Install and keep antivirus solutions up-to-date to help maximize your system’s protection from viruses.
10. Install tracking software in case you need to locate lost devices.

Why Cyber Hygiene is Important

Anyone can fall victim to fraud or cyber attacks. 

The majority of cyber attacks aren’t on the system, but rather the individuals behind them. An attacker’s number one motive is to get your users to reveal their personal information and passwords. Remember: it is easier for an impersonator to trick you into clicking a link than learning how to hack into your firewall.  

How Concensus Can Help

If putting online safety precautions in place seems daunting, we’re here to lend a hand. Here are some of the capabilities we can help your school or organization with when it comes to cyber hygiene.

Teach and Pilot

Concensus can set your organization up for success by piloting a training program featuring security awareness training modules. Together, we can create your desired data security programs and align them with a small department or group to best fit your organizational needs. We’ll also include compliance requirements within the training.

Implement a Company-Wide Procedure

Concensus can partner with your organization to provide ongoing training and random testing to employees using security awareness and training methods. We can also help to create new hire training around cyber hygiene and security awareness.