Laptop protection is very important, especially if you’re holding onto your company’s laptop. Although a lot of companies have resumed offices, employers are still providing personal laptops, in case they have to start working from home once again.
Company laptops have valuable information, from confidential documents to personal data, everything needs to be secured. Cyber-attacks are rather common on company laptops as they make attractive targets to be exploited.
If an attacker gets their hands on your company’s or your financial information, it’s extremely worrisome as you’ll have no way of retrieving it back. With remote work becoming more and more common, apart from needing high-speed internet such as AT&T Internet, laptop security is also a real concern,Â
Moreover, having your company’s laptop hacked or worse, stolen, puts both you and the company at risk of leak of information and financial losses. Therefore, you need to have strong, reliable protection.
In this article, we’ll be having four essential things you can do to ensure your data and device are well-protected.
Table of Contents
Set Unique Passwords
Of course, you shouldn’t only rely on passwords, but when it comes to improving your laptop’s security, they’re essential. Login passwords prevent other people from having access to confidential files stored in your laptop.
If you tend to use your laptop on public Wi-Fi, it’s important that your lock screen is password-protected. This goes without saying that you should set a unique and complex password which makes it hard to guess.
You should consider including numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols in your password to make it unique. That said, you should avoid using your birthday in your passwords. In fact, today there are single sign-on solutions that allow you to log in to all your accounts via one set of login passwords.
This allows you to maintain your laptop security. Moreover, you can also consider asking your IT admins if you can use any password authentication methods to further protect your laptop.
Keep Your Laptop Up-To-Date
If you’re wondering whether laptops require any antivirus, then the answer is a definite yes. Company laptops typically always have antivirus software installed. This takes care of your laptop’s data and prevents it from being hacked.
However, there are still a couple of things you can do on your own to further maintain your laptop’s security.
First and foremost, you should be monitoring what you’re downloading. For instance, if you’re downloading a file or update that has extensions in it, it’s something you should be concerned about. If you’re doubtful, you can use your company’s antivirus software to scan any updates or files you’re going to download.
Therefore, it’s important that you keep your laptop’s software and antivirus up-to-date, and scan any external files or updates you’ll be downloading.
Encryption of Your Data
Of all the things you can do to secure your laptop, this is one of the most efficient and strongest methods of protection. Encryption is by far the way to protect your laptop.
Login passwords alone don’t ensure full-proof protection because cybercriminals are capable of removing the laptop’s hard drive and accessing all your files. In fact, expert hackers can easily break through your system’s password-protected login screen.
That is why encryption is essential to protecting your laptop. Encryption covers all your data and files into code, concealing your content and making it almost impossible for hackers to steal all your information.
Encryption provides protection against attackers trying to access your data. Moreover, you should copy all the encryption code onto a separate USB so that if anything goes south, you have your data on a separate device.
Stay PrivateÂ
It’s important to stay private when in public, even if you’re using DIRECTV packages. Although global data privacy is constantly evolving, you do some extreme things to improve your online privacy.
For instance, you can consider using privacy screens that restrict otters from viewing your screen if they are near you. As rare as it may seem, there’s a chance of a shoulder-surfing attack happening to you, hence, privacy screens are a great help.
Another thing you should consider is using VPN. This conceals your real identity and location while on a public network. This also prevents your ISP from tracking your online activities and further encrypts traffic between the server and you.
All in All
There are multiple ways to protect your laptop, but we’ve shared the four most essential and strongest ways. With how fast technology is evolving, cybercrimes are becoming more common.
That is why it’s become more important than ever to protect your laptop. You wouldn’t want to lose confidential data and not be able to retrieve it. We hope you will consider the four ways we’ve shared above, and let us know if you feel more can be done!
