Essential tips on how to improve online security for your garage

CarVue's Alex Knight shares his advice on how to ensure your garage is safe in a world of online threats

Essential tips on how to improve online security for your garage
Human error is by far the most likely way that you will have a security breach but CarVue say it is also one of the easiest ways to ramp up your protection. Image: Bigstock.

It’s easy to think you’re a small business and no one is interested in what you’re doing, but the fact is, if you make it easy for hackers and fraudsters you become a target by default, reports CarVue’s Alex Knight.

Human error is by far the most likely way that you will have a security breach of some sort, yet it is also one of the easiest ways to ramp up your protection.

Anti-virus and anti-malware protection

It goes without saying that you should have anti-virus and anti-malware protection in place.

Between them they will stop most of the nasty things out there lurking in cyber space.

Anti-virus protects you from the legacy viruses which are still around today, and anti-malware generally tackles all the newer, more sophisticated attacks although it too guards against viruses.

Passwords

You’ve probably heard this a hundred times but it’s true and we bet you don’t do it: change your passwords regularly.

The more complex your passwords, the stronger they are and the less likely you will find yourself the subject of an attack.

Use a combination of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and symbols.

It should be 12 characters long and ideally be a set of random characters although the difficulty then is remembering it.

The temptation is to use the same password for everything and that means you can be asking for trouble.

Installing a password manager takes the headache away and does the hard work for you.

Emails

Often the weakest link in a system is its emails and you only need to mistakenly click on one of these phishing emails and, boom, your security has been breached.

We’ve all seen emails supposedly from the government or from a courier company informing us about our delivery.

91 per cent of security breaches are a result of someone clicking on a phishing email.

Look out for them.

If it looks dodgy or too good to be true, it probably is.

Employees

It is imperative that you make employees aware of the kind of phishing emails circulating and what to do if they spot something suspicious.

You also need to have policies in place when it comes to providing information such as bank details to email requests.

Spoofing emails are nothing more than old fashioned con tricks given a digital edge, more common in larger organisations where an email purports to be a supplier or a big boss asking you to transfer payment immediately.

The fraudsters would have been scanning your emails to find the info they need to do a convincing con job.

Sometimes they will be looking out for customer information so if you have a car sales site, a scammer may identify a customer who is buying a car and send them an email pretending to be you asking for the deposit or balance to be transferred to an account providing false details.

Of course, the first time a customer becomes aware is when you call to request the funds and the customer relies they have been duped.

If you have strict policies in place such as ‘we never provide bank details by email’ and you make customers aware, it means if your customer receives such an email, they are less likely to fall for the scam and find themselves out of pocket.

Third party systems

Most businesses will use third party systems to fulfil a variety of functions.

In the auto industry, there are a number on the market and chances are you will have a fair few in place.

The bigger your business, the more likely you are to have several systems in operation such as lead management or CRM.

Many of these will be accessed via the internet so you need to be confident your providers have a strong security policy in place.

You will also need to ensure that your systems are fully up-to-date and any patch releases are implemented.

Multi-layered security

If you are a Carvue user, you can be assured that we practice what we preach and have adopted a multi-layered approach to our security.

We utlise Microsoft cloud services so you can be confident the very best and latest security technology is in operation. It doesn’t matter how big or small a business, all our clients are subject to the same high levels of security.

For further information about CarVue, click ‘more details’ below.

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