I am not going to rant about yet another shoddy Government Department.
Yesterday this northern lad was in the big smoke and I caught the news that names, addresses, dates of birth, bank details etc of parents who receive child benefits were lost.
Oh well that’s only 25 million people put at risk!
To minimise the risk to you if you are worried here is some guidance:
- Check on a regular basis your credit report. This should be part of your strategy these days anyway, there are many companies out there that offer this service one such example is Equifax.
- Do not give out any personal details to anyone who calls you out of the blue saying it’s about this recent debacle. Do take their name and number, and if you are worried contact your bank.
- The above also applies to letters through the post.
- If you see any transactions on your bank statements that you do not recognise contact your bank immediately. If you have online access I would suggest keeping a careful eye on your transactions on a regular basis.
What happened at the Benefits Agency only goes to highlight how sensitive data needs to be protected.
How many small businesses protect their data? Having it sat on your hard drive without any passwords is not very safe especially if you use the internet. Is internet use protected? Do you have firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spam software?
This really should make many small businesses sit up and think, is my data protected?
It doesn’t stop at protection, what about disaster recovery, if you had a break in, if your computer stops working, how will you get to your data?
I don’t want to turn this into a plug, but this is why we use winweb for you clients, and ourselves, they have all the encryption and data protection in place, they have the back up and disaster recovery in place, at least if you loose your computer for what ever reason all you have to do is login over an internet connection and all your financial data, customer and supplier contact details etc are all sat there, safer than being on your hard drive!
Take time, take stock.
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