Showing all posts tagged security

In General

Secure Your Home: Top Tips

Author Nicki CawoodPosted on
Secure Your Home: Top Tips

Having someone break into your home is certainly not a pleasant idea. I live in a lovely area, with great neighbours (I’ve just moved and the community feel is phenomenal). I’d like to think that we are immune in this lovely place from criminal activity however you just never know. Making sure that you secure your home should be at the top of your list of priorities, whether you’ve just moved or not. People forget that house alarms that are present when you move in have the same password or code as the previous owner or tenant. Consider changing this asap or upgrading to something more suited to your needs.

At best, someone breaking into your home is likely to mean that you get cleaned out, and lose a lot of valuable belongings, and are forced to contend with the resulting financial struggle.

At worst, a break-in becomes a home invasion, and you or your loved ones are caught unawares.

Here are just a few basic ideas for how to secure your home, if you’ve recently been thinking about the fact that you need to do it, but aren’t really sure where to start.

Secure Your Home With Smart Tech

In the last few years, “smart technology” has exploded in popularity and sophistication, particularly in regards to the home. Many people, for example, adjust the lighting in their homes and set the thermostat via apps on their phones, now.

Of course, home security wasn’t left out of the smart tech boom. You can now buy outdoor security cameras to protect your property, that are integrated into doorknobs, and that send alerts and video clips to your phone, among other things.

There are plenty of different smart tech devices out there for home security – do a bit of searching online, and try to identify the tools that most appeal to you, and that seem like they’d be most useful. Our secure your home campaign already has this box ticked as we have a swanky security system installed. That doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels though!

Secure Your Home: Be Discreet

Put up net curtains for during the daytime, and thick blackout curtains at night. This is a very basic tip, but a surprising number of people, particularly in small and relatively peaceful communities, don’t observe it.

Here’s a pretty straightforward fact: if someone has it in their mind to rob a home, they are going to be significantly more inclined to rob your home, if they can easily peer through your windows from half a mile away, and identify every valuable possession you have.

As a general rule, you want to make it very difficult for people to effectively “case” your home, and see what you have inside.

For one thing, that means you should put up net curtains to obscure the view into your house during the day, and have thick blackout curtains that you can draw at night, to keep things invisible.

Don’t Advertise an Empty House

When you go away on vacation – or even just for an evening or weekend – you should make it as ambiguous as possible to anyone who might be watching, whether or not you’ve actually left.

If you post on social media that you are on your way out/on your holidays, you’re sending a pretty clear signal to anyone who might be watching that the coast is clear. Post your holiday pics when you get home! If possible, try to be a bit more discreet, and use timers to switch your lights on at regular intervals, so it looks like someone might be home.

In Conclusion

I love our home, despite only living in it for a relatively short time. The idea of someone breaking in horrifies me and so we have taken extra special measure to ensure that we are secure and that we feel safe and secure too. If you don’t feel the same way it might be a good time to review your home security measures and take steps to secure your home to a higher level.

In Business & Blogging

Secure Passwords Are Essential

Author Nicki CawoodPosted on
secure passwords
Secure passwords are crucial to online security. A Stormtrooper guard is not enough.

Have you ever been hacked? I have. It wasn’t fun and it cost me money. The whole experience made me re-think my internet security habits, especially my secure passwords.  Given the wealth of information we host, share and collect online, whether you’re running a business online or use it for everyday browsing and organisation your passwords are important. 

Despite being so important people are opening themselves up to vulnerabilities thanks to not using secure passwords.


People Still Choose Easy-To-Crack Passwords

Many of us still pick simple passwords. These might be our pet’s names or our birthdays; we still default to basics, mostly so that we can remember our many passwords. In business, the failure to choose secure passwords could cost you. Not only could using Snowy’s name as your password risk your profits; it also exposes customer info. Hackers can crack passwords like these without even needing equipment. To make sure it doesn’t happen, be smart. Always include upper and lower case letters, as well as numbers and/or symbols. 


People Write Passwords Down

The trouble is that complicated passwords like those mentioned above are tricky to remember. That’s good in many ways, but it also means a lot of us fall foul to writing them down somewhere. You may keep them on a post-it near your desk, or even save them in a computer file. You don’t need me to tell you why that’s bad. If passwords are written down in physical or digital form, there’s a risk that the wrong person will see them. It’s crucial, then, that you memorise passwords without making a note of them.

There are plenty of memory methods you could use to do this. If you have a whole team, it’s worth turning to sso solutions (single sign-on solutions) like those offered by ProofID. This means that staff members only need to remember one password to gain access to everything they need. Thus, there’s more chance of them being able to remember without jotting sensitive information down.

 

Shared Passwords Lead to Exposure

Within a company, it’s also not unusual for team members to share a password to certain applications. This is a fast way to make business easier and can seem like a no-brainer. That is of course until you consider that the more people who use that one password, the more risk there is of a breach. It is so important to make sure that if you share applications with others, as I sometimes do with clients, that you utilise secure passwords.

Secure Passwords Summary

My hack was some time ago and thankfully not caused by a password issue. It could have been though. These days I’m GDPR ready, secure passwords are in place, I use an encrypted online password manager and I don’t use the same password twice. I make changing those secure passwords periodically an ongoing business admin task and once I’ve finished using an application with someone else, I change that password straight away. With a little effort, you may enjoy the peace of mind that comes with using secure passwords on all of your devices and across all of your accounts and sites.

 

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