Financial Security Tips for Remote Workers and Their Families
Thursday, March 12, 2020, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
Working from home offers a serious amount of freedom and flexibility, which explains why remote working is such a fast-growing trend.
While there are real benefits to remote work, logging in from the sofa does come with a few complications.
Most people think primarily about the social implications of remote work. Isn’t hanging out with your work wife/husband/best friend half the reason you’re still hanging on at your current job?
Well, even that problem is solved thanks to intracompany social networks like Workplace by Facebook and Slack, which connect employees whether they’re across the office or around the world.
The big issue that’s too often overlooked is security. When you’re working from home, you’re outside your company’s firewall and away from the in-house IT staff.
Your individual computer is more vulnerable than your work desktop, especially if you use a personal computer that your kids can access.
How do you protect your security as a remote worker? There are three simple (and free) things that anyone can do to stop thieves at the gates.
Image Source: Photo by Paige Cody on Unsplash
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Stick to Secure Wifi at All Times
Working from home means you work from home — until it doesn’t. If you have kids, you very quickly find yourself working from the car, soccer practice, piano lessons, and in a Starbucks (because it’s somehow quieter there). The availability of public wifi means that working and parenting can happen at the same time, and that’s great.
What’s important to remember is that there really is no place like home, or at least your secure home internet network. Public wifi comes with huge risks that are causing security providers to post articles about why you should never connect to a public, open wifi network. Whether you’re using your computer for work or to catch up on home-related admin, you need to be on a secure network to protect your passwords, financial data, and your work product.
In an ideal world, you should only log-on to your computer in public when you have secure wifi. Fortunately, that’s not as hard as it used to be. You carry your own private network in your pocket. So it’s a good idea to use your phone as a hotspot (and get unlimited data) and only access it through a secure password. Oh, and make sure your phone doesn’t log in to public wifi networks either.
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Create Separate Personalized Accounts
Do you work remotely or run your business from your personal laptop? Is it a device that your kids also have access to? Those click-happy critters are actually a security threat. It’s not because they’re malicious. Kids are just more vulnerable in terms of being scammed into providing sensitive information. And if they’re playing away on your work computer, then you could be vulnerable, too.
Preventing accidental malware threats requires caution and an up-to-date security package, but there’s something else you can do to secure your credit card numbers, passwords, and work product. The best part is that it’s simple and free. What is this magical solution? It’s giving your kids their own browser profiles.
If you’re running on Chrome, set up a browser profile for you, a profile for your work life, and then a separate browser profile for your kids. Then, your kids won’t have access to anything valuable that could accidentally get passed on, hacked, or deleted. Plus, a separate profile will keep their history separate from yours, so you can see what they’re up to without sorting through your own browsing habits.
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Set-up Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication is increasingly prevalent and many companies now demand it. If you don’t already have two-factor authentication turned on for your most important accounts, go set it up ASAP.
When you use two-factor authentication, you catch any fraud right away because you’ll need to approve the log-in or transaction before it happens, usually with a code delivered to your phone by SMS or through an app (Google offers this). It’s also great for people who share their devices with kids because you can see if they’ve gotten into your credit cards or accounts and tried to buy something (usually games or upgrades) on their devices.
Of course, two-factor authentication isn’t perfect. Nothing can prevent all security issues, and you still need strong passwords and secure PIN numbers. However, enabling this step both makes it more difficult to attack your accounts and makes them less attractive to hackers. It’s a win-win.
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Stay Secure at Home
These tips will help protect you from both malicious hackers and pre-teens who’d rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission to use your credit card. However, it’s important to remember that you’ll need to do more than use secure wifi and keep your kids out of your browser, particularly if you’re accessing company work product. Standard rules, like using encryption and strong passwords, still apply.
You should also make sure that you’re particularly careful when you log into your banking sites: only use official apps, double-check your URL, and remember that your bank won’t call you.
Remember, you can’t prevent all attacks, but by limiting your exposure to common avenues used by hackers, you’ll go a long way towards ensuring that remote work isn’t a threat to your finances.
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