Staff report
Just as the coronavirus has pushed more and more Texans into working remotely comes a new study indicating that Texas is third in U.S. states that have been subject to data breaches.
The news comes on the heels of recent reports that prominent Americans including Barack Obama and Bill Gates were the subject of data breaches to their Twitter accounts on behalf of Bitcoin.
According to the website SocialCatfish.com, Texas has seen 2,842 breaches of personal data this year. California topped the list with 5,377, followed by Florida with 3,10.
The U.S. as a whole has seen 35,732 data breaches that are known to have occurred.
The website offered the following guidelines for protecting personal data from possible breaches:
• Safeguard data with strong passwords and consier a auxiliary hard drive, server or system folder to store it.
• Destroy before you dispose of your information. Destroy any hard drive containing critical data before recycling or otherwise disposing of it.
• Update work procedures: If an employee stole data from your company, make sure it doesn’t happen again and download programs to monitor your computer. Also, come up with rules for employees to follow and enforce them.
• Educate/train employees: Make sure new employees are trained in what data breaches are and how to prevent them. Educate them on where to put hard drives and encourage multi-factor authentication.
• Control computer usage: Control who uses what programs and who sees what data.
• Secure all computers: Make sure that al computers have softward to protect against ata breaches. Also, make sure that each computer has a secure password and consider multi-factor authentification.
• Keep security software up to date: Make sure you update security software on all computers.
• Step unemcrypted data transmission: If you aren’t on a secure website with “https://“ at the beginning, then you may not want to be on that website. The less secure a website is, the more of a chance hackers can steal your information.
• Manage the use of portable media: If you are done using a flash drive or portable hard drive and it is storing persona data, make sure to eject it from your computer and put it in a safe place.
