If you know that a snow storm is approaching your home, do you prepare? Perhaps you stock up on some extra food, test your flashlight or your generator. Do you need to prepare? No, but you’ve likely learned that it’s better to prepare than to pay the price of running low on milk, bread, batteries, or other household staples. We should all adopt a similar stance when it comes to managing our technology.
Over the past 20 years the Internet has grown and it now pervades all aspects of our lives. Criminals and con-artists have moved online as well. By shifting into cyber-crime and cyber-scams they can remain anonymous and trick people or steal from people anywhere on the planet. Generative AI tools only make it easier for them to send convincing emails, impersonate a loved-one or find security vulnerabilities in applications and accounts. We all need to prepare by being proactive.
If you’re not proactive, you risk incurring technical debt, in addition to the security risks you’re assuming. Technical debt is the accumulated costs you accrue by not updating applications and devices. The debt tends to compound. In my experience, you’ll ultimately have to pay off that debt, and it’s almost always more expensive to pay off the debt than it would have cost to have stayed up to date as the technology evolved.
Here’s an analogy. Dentists encourage us to brush and floss our teeth regularly and come in for regular checkups. If you never brush or floss or visit the dentist, you might develop an abscess or need root canal surgery or possibly have some teeth removed. While the costs of these potential outcomes varies, I’ll bet that most of these are more expensive they buying toothpaste and toothbrushes and spending a few minutes per day cleaning our teeth and visiting the dentist. Even if the possible negative outcomes don’t cost more money than being proactive would have cost, these negative outcomes are often big headaches and are more costly in terms of anxiety or stress.
In order to be proactive with our technology, we need to do the following:
- Update our devices to protect against security vulnerabilities
- Replace aging Macs and other Apple products if they are no longer being supported
- Monitor your device backups and test our backups
- Update our web browser to protect against security vulnerabilities
- Scan for malware and viruses
- Use a password manager to create and store unique passwords for each login we use
- Enable two-factor authentication on our accounts to improve their security
It’s important to take action. Please follow my basic security recommendations to secure your devices, secure your accounts and educate yourself.
This is why I strongly encourage all of my clients to become members of my Proactive Support Plan (PSP). Signing up for my Proactive Support plan takes care of nearly all of the items listed.
Please take heed and be proactive when it comes to updating and protecting your devices, your accounts, and your applications. By updating your applications and devices, enabling two-factor authentication, and using a password manager, you’ll likely deter the criminals and scammers. They’ll go elsewhere and pick on somebody who hasn’t prepared as much as you have.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash