Summer is a busy time for businesses, when many employees are taking annual leave or working from home - or even working from abroad. Cyber breaches are on the rise - so don’t let fraudsters take advantage of the summer period where employers may take their eye off the ball.

It’s really important to ensure that your business is still cyber secure across this busy period, which can be done by taking some fairly simple steps. Most cyber criminals are looking for weak spots, where people forgot to update their laptop or use unsecured Wi-Fi to log onto work accounts, for example.

One of the more important parts of good cyber hygiene is consistency - ensuring that regular updates and checks are done.  A report from Microsoft states that keeping up to date with basic cyber hygiene will protect you from 98% of cyber attacks. 

Here is a summary of the cyber practices that you should check this summer. Keep communicating with your employees how important cyber security hygiene is and offer them regular reminders to check all of their own devices, passwords and processes. 

Be wary of summer phishing scams 

Scammers can create phishing emails, pretending to be from bosses or other senior figures. This could involve creating urgency around getting an invoice paid or asking for other information. Be vigilant and look out for email addresses that look very similar but are slightly different, bad spelling and grammar and a sense of urgency. 

Also think twice about whether you need to have your date of return on your out of office email. This is information that cyber scammers could potentially use against you to create more realistic phishing emails. 

Make sure you have strong passwords 

Ensure that every employee and every shared account has strong passwords in place. The NCSC always recommends using ‘three random words’ which ensures that the password is completely unique. You can then add numbers and characters on as well as make sure it’s more complex. 

Use a password manager 

A password manager provides an extra layer of security and means that all of your passwords are safely encrypted. This also helps keep them safe because employees don’t need to write them down or store them in other unsafe places. You must also have strict rules about not having passwords written on sticky notes on computers! 

Turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Any online accounts with the option of MFA should be set up, ideally using an authenticator app. This is a really simple but effective way of thwarting cyber hackers because it uses a second step, often a mobile phone, to ensure that it is really you trying to log on. 

Restrict access where necessary 

You may want to introduce restrictions to prevent employees from logging on to work emails and other accounts while out of the UK. As well as preventing potential cyber breaches from unsecured Wi-Fi and other methods, this will also prevent potential theft or loss of work equipment while abroad. 

Install anti-virus software across the whole business 

This is a fairly basic point but always worth repeating. Ensure every device that is used across your business has anti-software installed - and that it’s kept up to date as well. 

Ensure that every device has software updated

It’s also really important to ensure that every device across the business has its software kept up to date. This is a really simple thing to do but it is often overlooked. Ensure you send regular communications to employees to remind them that all software should be kept up to date. 

Make sure you have backups of all IT and computer data 

If you don’t have regular backups of all company data, then this should be an absolute priority. If you don’t have an IT department, find a reputable IT consultant to help you set up data backups. In the event of data loss, like malware or ransomware attacks, this could be the only way to get your business back up and running. 

Educate your staff about wifi hotspots 

Employees should not use public Wi-Fi hotspots in places such as airports, hotels or coffee shops, with any work laptops or mobile phones. This can give cyber fraudsters a chance to gain access to your information and accounts by various methods. Fraudsters can also set up malicious hotspots which mimic genuine free hotspots, which are set up to gain access to your accounts. Make sure employees turn off the ‘connect automatically’ feature on their devices. If you have employees who do have to regularly use different public wifi in the course of their work, consider paying for a VPN for them. Equally, make sure your employees are not logging on to any work accounts from public computers or shared devices.