Digital Migration

For our Tuesday Tech Tip, I want to talk to you about what they’re calling the Digital Migration. We talked about what that looks like and really what that means as we look forward into the future and stay tuned.

I want to talk to you about what they’re calling the “2021 Great Digital Migration.” Ultimately, this is a study that the Drop Security Firm just put out. They are talking about just the trends that we saw in 2021. Here’s just a couple of statistics to kind of kick us off.

There was a 450% increase in username and password exclusions. What that means is ultimately the bad guys can get our usernames and passwords more effectively. So you say, well, how could that happen? A lot of it is because people are working from home and they’re working on networks and computers that are much less secure than at the office. And the bad actors are taking advantage of that.

Another stat here is 43% of breaches are caused by unauthorized access. This means that these bad guys can take our passwords and our usernames. Then they’re able to elevate their privileges and take something that they’ve stolen and they figure out how to gain more unauthorized access into systems by using some of the tools that they have readily available to them.

 Another statistic here is that 34% of reaches Target Healthcare. This isn’t surprising because if you look at where we are in the world of the pandemic of COVID, people are on the edge because of it which makes them very likely to click.

Another stat here that I want to focus on just for a second is that there was a staggering two X amount of time that people spent online in 2021. It’s absolutely staggering because that number was already high, and we have a two X on that.  How did this happen? Well, think about it all that commute time. It’s now basically plopped down in front of a computer. And ultimately, whenever we spend a lot of time doing something like that, it fatigues us.

So here are some tips on how we can kind of beat the bad guys. Well, first off is you need to take breaks throughout the day. You need to figure out that work-life balance. A lot of times when people are working from home they just work and work and work and work.  They’ll work before their shift starts, they’ll work after their shift finishes, and they don’t take any breaks in between. They’re much more likely to be in front of a screen. They’re much more likely to be fatigued. They’re also much more likely to sign up for new accounts.

When signing up for new accounts, we want to make sure that we’re not using the same username and password. Even today, they still say 65% of people are using the same passwords across multiple logins. Your email password might be the same as your bank which might be the same as your password where you log in. You want to use different passwords.

 I use a product called Last Pass, and it used to be a free version. Now they charge for it, but it’s worth the money because I don’t even know my passwords anymore. They’re securely kept and encrypted, and they can be very complex. I just click a button and boom, I have access to them, whether it’s on my mobile device or on my computer. Also, it will share between different computers that you log into really easy to use. This is very effective and very cost-effective as well.

Finally, we want to use multifactor authentication. We want to have it to where whenever we go to log in, even our social media accounts, just like with our bank, it texts us a code. Are there some Authenticator apps out there? Google makes one. Microsoft also makes one. We use a product that’s kind of universal called Duo. It’s a product that Cisco owns. You want to use multi-factor authentication. I’ll throw one more thing in there, the device that you’re connecting to from home must have the same type of security tools and management that your office computer does. You have to have some form of a firewall at your house and you have to be patching the system. Also, you need to have endpoint detection and response, which a lot of people would call antivirus on that machine. That is not the freebie version, but the version that’s being managed by your IT Department.

I hope these things are helpful. If you have questions, I’m always here to help stay safe this year. Let’s make it great!