Many Canadians set up a home office during the pandemic. Whether you use it every day, a couple of times a week or just for personal emails and online shopping, you want to be sure your setup isn’t leaving you vulnerable to cyber crime. Here are important steps you can take to secure your home.
Wi-Fi
Securing your wireless network limits access to personal or corporate information on any of your wireless devices, including Wi-Fi-enabled ones like your digital home assistant, wireless printer or doorbell camera. If you work for a company, unsecured Wi-Fi could also be a breach of corporate safety protocol. Make sure you’ve changed the default name and password of your router, and choose wireless authentication with WPA2-PSK or WPA2-Personal encryption in your router’s settings.
Video calling
Video calls, on any platform, can reveal a lot about your life to the others on the call. They can also be targets for cyber criminals. Be careful of what you share on the call and ahead of time. Don’t post video call links publicly and consider using a digital background. Also, ensure your platform has security features like secure messaging (e.g. encryption) and the option to include passwords to access calls. Be sure to keep up with video calling software updates for added safety as well.
Updates
This is one that’s easy to get behind on doing, but it’s highly important – not just for new features but for important security patches to help prevent cyberattacks. Doing the updates requested by your device in a timely manner keeps your device running at its best and prevents lost work and computer glitches. Always enable automatic updates where possible.
