Vodafone summarises the National Cyber Security Centre’s advice on keeping your data safe
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre provides independent advice through their Cyber Essentials scheme to enable organisations to enhance their approach to cyber security. Practical steps which they recommend considering in order to improve cyber security include:
- - Ensuring firewalls are enabled and configured for all devices – especially important for devices that are connecting to the internet or untrusted Wi-Fi networks
- - Only using software, apps and accounts that are needed and protecting them with strong passwords. Employees using important applications, such as banking or IT administration, should also prove who they are by entering a numeric code that is sent to their smartphone or by using their fingerprint as a secondary form of authentication
- - Users should be set up with individual user accounts. Only employees that need admin accounts should be provided with them, thereby reducing the risk of accounts with admin rights being compromised. The activities that can be carried out with Admin accounts should also be controlled
- - Protecting your laptops, smartphones, PCs and servers from malware and viruses by implementing and regularly updating anti-malware controls across devices. Phishing is a key method for infecting devices. It is therefore also important to increase awareness of phishing attacks
- - Ensuring Operating Systems, software and devices are using the latest updates to benefit from fixes of known security vulnerabilities
- - Regularly backing up important data on separate and unconnected storage to combat ransomware attacks.
An increased awareness of cyber threats and getting the simple things right are the first steps in enhancing your organisation’s cyber readiness and resilience in the face of the evolving threat and regulatory landscape.
Click here to read the original version of this article on Vodafone’s site, or here to download the Vodafone report ‘The Future of Public Sector Connectivity’.