With over 88% of organisations asking their teams to work from home it seems we’ve now entered a new age of importance for internet security. With the lines blurred between work and play and an increased opportunity for fishing attacks, it’s imperative we all stay safe when working remotely, not only for our organisation but now for our own personal data.

Thankfully we’ve compiled a list of 6 amazing solutions to help keep you on top of security!

We all know about Antivirus, its goal is to protect you from potential threats on the web. It’s incredibly important that you have some sort of antivirus installed, whether that be a free antivirus software or one of our professional systems such as ESET.

Without some kind of protection, your device (and all of your personal details and documents!) are vulnerable, which leaves a window open for other devices on your home network (such as mobile devices) to potential attacks. This could lead to loss of your data, theft of personal information or substantial damage to your equipment, not good!

ATP helps protect you from Spam or Phishing and other malicious emails by scanning and removing them before they reach your inbox. Phishing attacks have become the most common gateway for internet viruses with 86% of UK organisations reporting an attack, that’s up 72% on the previous 3 years! As you can imagine, Advanced Threat Protection is a handy addition to have on your Office 365 subscription.

further benefits include:  

• ATP Safe Attachments: Provides zero-day protection to safeguard your messaging system by checking email attachments for malicious content. It routes all messages and attachments that do not have a virus/malware signature to a special environment, and then uses machine learning and analysis techniques to detect malicious intent. If no suspicious activity is found, the message is forwarded to the mailbox.

• ATP Safe Links: Provides time-of-click verification of URLs, for example in emails, messages and Office files. Protection is ongoing and applies across your messaging and Office environment. Links are scanned for each click: safe links remain accessible and malicious links are dynamically blocked.

• ATP for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams: Protects your organisation when users collaborate and share files, by identifying and blocking malicious files in team sites and document libraries.

• ATP anti-phishing protection: Detects attempts to impersonate your users and custom domains. It applies machine learning models and advanced impersonation-detection algorithms to avert phishing attacks.

Unfortunately, anyone still using Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft. It’s important that you make sure you have all of the service packs installed for any Windows 7 machines, however as Microsoft is no longer supporting this, no further security patches will be released. Our recommendation is to upgrade any Windows 7 machines to Windows 10. Microsoft push out Security and crucial updates once a month and service packs once a quarter to keep you protected.

The dark web is a scary place and thousands of us have our company as well as personal information available to it daily. Our Dark Web Monitoring service allows us to check if any of your credentials have been leaked for sale on the Dark Web. This alerts us as soon as credentials become available and allows us to change any account details before any damage is done. 

This tool allows us to prevent most attacks by monitoring your credentials 24/7, 365 days a year to understand your possible weak spots. You can sign up for a 3 month no commitment trial of our Dark Web Monitoring here.

This is a great tool to make sure that your machine is adhering to basic security checks which enables it to pass the Cyber Essentials standards. in particular it looks at making sure your machine: 

Has valid Antivirus/Malware protection

Has a password enabled on your machine

Does not allow applications to auto install onto your machine 

Has a personal firewall protection enabled

For more information on how you can protect your own or your organisations data whilst working remotely, then speak with our experts by calling 0333 344 2204 or emailing us on hello@itsb.co.uk