Cyber Monday Safety
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Cyber Monday first took flight years ago when most shoppers only had internet access at work. Employees went to work the Monday following Thanksgiving break and took to online sellers for specials they missed. E-commerce site owners picked up on the trend, and encouraged the onslaught of online employee shopping with a slew of their own discounts, sales, and site-wide deals.
These days, it is easy to find great Cyber Monday specials. If you’ve shopped the Cyber Monday discounts in the past, you’ll know that prices fluctuate throughout the course of the work day. This is because e-commerce site owners are searching for the optimal price point to ensure maximum viewership and revenue. General studies reveal that no other day encounters as many online shoppers.
Just as online shop goers and e-commerce sites are busy on Cyber Monday, so too are identity thieves working away on this day of heavy online traffic. Cyber crooks will be working overtime this Cyber Monday. Online criminals will send out a host of spam emails, phishing plots, and malware all meant to lure consumers into providing their personal banking information.
What should consumers and businesses do to protect themselves from this onslaught of malicious online activity? Here are a few key precautions you can take to keep your office computer secure on this busy Monday of online shopping.
The single most important action a business can take to provide adequate protection on Cyber Monday is to check to ensure their antivirus software is updated and running properly. Up-to-date network-wide antiviral platforms scan web traffic to catch suspicious activity across an entire network. As added safety, enterprises can place another layer of protection onto their server by blocking phishing email and the malicious codes these emails send out.
If you’re an employee with internet access on Cyber Monday and plan to shop for specials online, there are also some big things you can do to protect your personal data from being infiltrated. Make sure your web browser is up to date, and that any anti-spam or antivirus software on your computer is also updated to the newest version.
Be wary of sales seeming too good to be true, particularly from unfamiliar e-venders. If you find a great deal from an e-commerce website you know well – double check the sale by looking for it on the websites main page or homepage. If you can’t find the discount mentioned anywhere else on the site, it might be a malicious website mimicking the one you recognize. Use passwords for e-commerce sites that are different or difficult to crack. A simple method for ensuring your account encryptions are difficult to crack is to include capitals, lower-cases, numbers and symbols in your account passwords.
Once you have deemed a Cyber Monday discount legitimate, and are ready to make a purchase, be sure to use your credit card and not your debit card. Debit cards give criminals access to all of your sensitive bank data. As such, debit cards have become a popular target for hackers to steal your money.
Remember, Cyber Monday is a day of great specials and online discounts, but it is also a day one can easily fall victim to the perils of identity theft. Keep the above pointers in mind, and you’ll be on your way to a safe and fun Cyber Monday!
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