Protect Your Data Against Cyber Fraud

Why it’s Important to Protect Your Data Against Cyber Criminals

A one-password or weak password approach puts any user at a great risk of cyber fraud, theft, and professional liability. Hackers have developed plenty of tools for stealing account credentials and passwords, including social engineering manipulation, malware, prior breaches, and other tech tools.

“Password reuse is a really big problem,” says Chip Witt, head of product strategy for SpyCloud, an Austin, Texas-based company that alerts customers when employee or company assets have been compromised. “Once people find a good password, they’ll continue to reuse that password exactly, or variations of it. This is dangerous because the cybercriminal, once he has your password, can very easily access your accounts and the loyalty points, cash, and/or personally identifiable information within.”

The Dark Web: Is Your Company Data Safe?

It’s not just personal data that is at risk. Organizations of all sizes are also at jeopardy of data breaches when their employee accounts are hacked. Once hackers break in, they can leverage stolen data for a variety of fraudulent activities, such as business email compromise, invoice fraud, and employment fraud. They can also access confidential company information, financial accounts, and employee personal details, all managing to put the firm at high risk for financial and reputational damage.

As scary as this might sound, the risk doesn’t stop there. Cyber criminals can also sell your stolen credentials to other hackers on the dark web, which is a sliver of the deep web, the part of the internet not indexed by search engines. The dark web provides the required level of anonymity for hackers to digitally congregate for illegal activities.

In an article published by Drew Adamek on The Journal of Accountancy, Witt shares several ways that individual users and organizations can protect themselves against cyber fraud, account takeover, and personal information theft.

Read about them here.