High Performance Systems, Inc.

While most businesses understand the importance of backing up their server and files, many forget to back up their website!

Most sites are hosted on a third-party platform like Amazon or WordPress. However, these hosts have limits on what they back up, and the terms and conditions you agreed to will most likely waive their responsibility to preserve and back up your files and data.

Therefore, if you're posting a lot of new content, you should be backing up your site weekly if not daily. Hackers can (and do!) corrupt websites all the time. If you don't want to have the cost of a down website and the cost of rebuilding it, back up your website!

Side tip: Does your business depend on your website being online? Do you have a system checking it every couple of minutes to make sure it's up, online and available? We can help you make this happen; just let me know by responding to this e-mail.

A complex password is a necessity but hard to remember. And with so many websites requiring a password these days, users often reuse the same password again and again with different sites. BAD idea.

When a big company gets hacked (like LinkedIn, for example), the criminals post and sell the username, e-mail, password and confidential information in that account. Since many people reuse the same password, hackers will try that e-mail and password combination across multiple sites, including Amazon, PayPal or other sites where you might store credit card information.

Remember, they aren't doing this manually. They have highly sophisticated software to automate ALL of this. If you want a better way of storing and organizing UNIQUE passwords, we recommend using a password management system. DO NOT store your passwords in Excel files, Word files or within your Outlook. These are super easy for attackers to break into.

The bottom line is that no matter how much of a pain it is, i

Here's a disturbing but very real tactic for hackers: spying on you via your device's camera. Some simply watch you for fun. Others attempt to catch incriminating photos and then blackmail you by threatening to release the photos or video (that they have) to all your Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections or e-mail address book (which they might also have) unless you pay a ransom.

If you pay, guess what? You just identified yourself as someone who will pay for extortion, putting a target on your back. Plus, they still have your photos so they can come back and ask for more because they know you care.

As always, follow the various security strategies we've been sending you via these tips. As a backup, you can buy stickers that cover your camera with a slider so you can uncover it when you want to actually use it to take a picture or join a web meeting. These are really inexpensive and can be found on Amazon for under $10. Search for "we**am cover slider."