November's three top tips for securing your business

Every month, our partners the South West Cyber Resilience Centre (SWCRC) are providing some top tips to shore up your business from cyber attacks. 

The SWCRC is led by serving police officers and Home Office-backed as part of a not-for-profit partnership with businesses and academia.

What's that popping up?

Look out for popups on your webpages. An emerging tactic is for fake webpages to present you with a popup window to log into the site, giving away your password. You’re more likely to trust a popup, and it can be easily configured to display the name of a genuine URL across the top. If you want to be able to spot the difference: you will be able to resize a genuine new window, whereas a fake one can’t be resized or moved elsewhere on your desktop.

Keep it lean

Use only the software that you need. A report by Sonatype this month found that open-source software is increasingly insecure, and around 68% of those sampled had downloaded something that left them vulnerable. Make sure you’ve checked out the credentials of open source products, and reduce your risk by sticking to just what you need.

Don't miss the train(ing)

Cybsafe’s “Oh Behave!” report came out this month, and confirmed that whilst over 80% of breaches are down to human factors, 58% of people who had received training said they were better at recognising phishing messages, and 45% used better passwords. It does pose the question about what your business or charity has done to train your people this year. If the answer is ‘nothing’ then we’ve put together a blog showing the free stuff you can access… from a half hour of e-learning to face to face support from your local force.

Check back regularly for more expert advice from the SWCRC.