When you have been hacked you feel violated. It’s the same feeling I imagine you would have if your home was robbed. What to do if you’re hacked depends on when you discover it, where your back-ups are located and what cybersecurity tools you have in place.
One of the first feelings you will feel is, sorry for yourself. You will then berate yourself for not having taken the proper steps to protect yourself and your business. We know. Many of the clients we work with come to us after they’ve been hacked because the IT company they were working with fell asleep on the job. Now these new clients are coming to us, asking for help and by then the damage has been done but you can certainly take steps to prevent it from ever occurring again. If you can’t eradicate all threats, you can protect yourself and your data in the event you are the victim of another hack.
Sometimes you may not know you’ve been hacked until you get notifications from your various accounts asking you if you’d requested a new password, or sending you an authentication code. This is very troubling if you hadn’t requested any of them.
What To Do If You’re Hacked
- Time is of the essence. As soon as you notice a hacking event and potential identity theft, you need to act as quickly as possible. A cyberhacker knows he or she only has a limited amount of time to steal your identity and get into your accounts. They work quickly.
- Change your passwords. It doesn’t matter if you only think one of your accounts has been hacked – change the passwords on all of your accounts. Unfortunately, too many people use the same password or a variation on the same password (monkey123 or monkey1234, you get the point). Use a password manager to help you make secure, virtually unhackable passwords.
- Set up a credit monitoring account and set up fraud alerts. You need to know what your credit is now and track it to ensure no new accounts are opened in your name. Remember it may be months down the road when this happens. Let your bank and credit cards know you have been hacked.
- Assume the worst case scenario. Assume that ALL of your accounts have been hacked, then take steps to mitigate the damage. If a hacker has gotten access to your email account, you can assume he or she will be contacting everyone in your address book to try and get them to click on phishing links.
- Set up multi-factor authentication on all your accounts. If you didn’t take this step before, you definitely need to take it now. Don’t bypass this step because it will definitely alert you to an attempt to get into your accounts.
Don’t spend too much time worrying about the fact that you have been hacked, take active steps to recover from it. Then take proactive steps to prevent it from happening again.
WareGeeks Solutions is a Roselle, New Jersey-based full-service IT Solutions and Service Provider.
We specialize in Data Protection, specifically Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) and Cyber Security. We work with all small, medium, and large companies. We conduct a multi-level risk analysis that identifies processes procedures and/or technology that stifle productivity with oppressive layers of complexity. If you have IT or security questions contact Seth at WareGeeks Solutions. For information or a consultation, call (877) 653-7146, or email us at info@waregeeks.com. www.waregeeks.com
