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considered as good as hacked. For hackers, any password on paper is like putting a spare
house key under a fake rock on your front porch.

Set up a guest WiFi network. Most wireless routers have an optional guest wireless network
feature. This should always be enabled for the following reasons:

• The guest WiFi provides visitors access to the Internet without giving them access to
other computers on your main network.
• Any infected laptops or devices on the guest network cannot infect computers on your
main network.
• Under optimal conditions, anyone with your wireless password can sit up to 1000 feet
outside your office and use a laptop or smart device to access your network. Visitors
with guest access cannot come back to snoop around on your main network.

Some guest WiFi access can be set to automatically turn off after business hours. Make sure
the guest SSID name and password are different than your main wireless network.

Let staff check their personal business on their own devices. BYOD (Bring Your Own
Device) policies allow employees to connect their smartphones, tablets and laptops to the office
guest WiFi network. By letting them handle personal affairs on their own devices this greatly
reduces the chances of accidentally infecting company computers. The BYOD policy provides a
clearly-defined set of rules, standards and penalties for this privilege. These rules should be
easy straight forward and easy to follow.

Subscribe to an endpoint security protection provider. A basic antivirus is not enough. Seek
out an endpoint solution that can handle PC, Mac, and smart devices. Along with scanning files
and emails, this should also scan any USB flash drives or SD cards that get inserted into any
office computer.

Subscribe to a third-party spam filtering service. Although most Internet Service Providers
have some form of spam filtering in place, they can’t keep up with the tsunami of junk email. By
subscribing to a third-party spam filter, incoming email gets checked through their service first
then forwarded to your company inboxes. This greatly reduces the amount of phishing emails
that employees may get fooled into clicking on.

Accessing the business network from outside the office should always be done over a
VPN connection. Short for Virtual Private Network, a VPN creates a secure Internet tunnel
from your computer or device to the office network. This prevents hackers from stealing
passwords from employees connecting in over public WiFi networks.

Check your backups by testing them regularly. Data breaches, disasters and virus
outbreaks on the office network should be treated like catching the common cold – sooner or
later it will happen to you. Solid backups are your only true protection against potentially losing
everything.
44 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2015 Edition
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