Here’s a quick win to bolster your cyber security that’ll cost you nothing. If your email provider gives you the option for turning on MFA (and any reputable provider will), it’s critical to do so on all accounts.
This should be the minimum protection you have in place given how easy and effective it is.
MFA uses a second piece of information to authenticate access. A password alone doesn’t provide enough protection for any web based email services like Gmail. But with MFA enabled there’s an additional layer of sign-in security.
This is important for freelancers. If someone gets access to your email they can cause a lot of damage by:
- Resetting passwords for third-party services you rely on for work, including banking and invoicing apps, social media and domains
- Impersonating you. It’s not uncommon for hackers to send fake invoices or contact clients requesting sensitive information
- Accessing client data. Think of all of the client information you hold. If a hacker gets access to this you could be in breach of GDPR
- Locking you out of your accounts. The energy, time and stress spent trying to gain access while managing your workload is unfathomable
Enabling MFA takes less than 5 minutes. If you haven’t yet done so, take a few minutes to enable it within your email provider.
Here are some additional but basic security measures to follow once you’ve done this.
- Use a password manager. You want to avoid using the same or similar passwords across your services, but you can’t be expected to remember every 16 digit password with letters, numbers and special characters. That’s where a password manager comes in
- Use a VPN to secure your connection. This means hackers can’t intercept passwords and it’s harder for them to target you. VPN plans aren’t free, but they are pretty cheap
- Encrypt your back-ups. You are backing up work, right? If so it’s easy enough to encrypt the data so that a third-party can’t access it. Time Machine or third-party tools allow you to select encryption
Cyber security is a bit of a minefield. You can go deep into network segregation, protective DNS, firewalls and more but all of that can be overwhelming. Instead you can get started today with some basic security by enabling MFA, using a password manager and encrypting your back-ups.
