YAKIMA, WA – With black Friday coming up and the holiday gift giving season right around the corner, hackers might be patiently waiting to get in to your networks.
Hackers know that many people will be out of the office during the holidays, so they probably wont be paying attention to little details on their electronics,
that’s when people are most vulnerable.
“So the response time is a lot less where they notice something malicious is going on because they’re out” said Daniel Hobberchalk, Network Security Engineer for Datalink Networks. “One or two days of an alert not getting recognized, that’s all a hackers need really to get enough data to cripple a network.”
Some things people can be doing to make sure they are mitigating their chance of a potential hack would be…
“Make sure they are new and you are buying them from a reputable retailer, not just some guy at a swap meat obviously because you never know what’s being done to them you know additional software that’s being thrown on” said Hobberchalk.
When it comes devices that are being bought for children…
“There’s ways to set up separate profiles for the kids so it has like parental locks” said Hobberchalk. “It locks it down a lot more so they don’t have full access so it will separate the two.”
He says the biggest thing is to not open any suspicious emails and be aware of your passwords if you get an alert.
“Go change them, I know a lot of folks don’t like to change it right away because they get busy or they don’t want to try to re-remember a new password but it’s very important because networks are getting compromised all the time” said Hobberchalk.
Other things you can be doing to help protect yourself is to use a strong password, length is more important than complexity and don’t use the same password more than once.
You can also enable a two factor authentication on your email, login’s for social media and other password related websites.
By following those tips it will help keep you safe, and avoid most wide sweeping attacks.
For more information visit: Protect Your Computer From Viruses, Hackers, and Spies
