There are many issues with cyber security and working from home. Lots of topics come up. But a main topic that not many people think about is their home modem and network.
Most of us live in Ontario, Canada and our home network is provided by Bell, Rogers or some sort of brand related to those major internet providers.
When you sign up with any ISP you get mailed a modem – a box with the ability to connect your desktop computers, devices, and switches to a network as well as providing your home with Wi-Fi.
A major security concern many businesses and organizations have run into is having a very unsafe home network.
The reason being is when you get your modem, you never change the password or administrator password from the default.
What’s the administrator password?
That is different from your network password, this is not the one that allows your wireless devices to connect to the Wi-Fi, though you should update that password when you have a chance as well.
The administrator password is the password that allows you to login to the modem (via an internet browser) and change the passwords and information, change the network names or SSID’s.
Changing your administrator password and keeping it somewhere safe in your home is a smart move. They only sell a few hundred different types of modems, and these modems come usually with the same admin password and username. This allows for anyone who knows the username and password to hop into your home network. And since people have been working from home more often the not, that means hackers can now access your work information from your home!
It’s a scary place to be. One major preventative measure you can take is to change the passwords on your home network.
Another function you can add is to ask for multifactor authentication.
We don’t mean setting multifactor authentication on your video game consoles or smart TV’s. We understand that sometimes you just want to throw on a show and not worry about having a token or fingerprint scanner beside you.
We do think you should setup your fingerprint scanner on your laptop or cellphone because these devices usually have this option built in! With most Lenovo laptops today, they have built in fingerprint scanner and RI camera and uses human presence detection. So, stepping away from your computer at home is fine, you can trust your family, but stepping away maybe working at a café patio can become a problem. These RI cameras use this human presence detection and facial recognition to make things more secure and easier to open, instead of remembering a password, you just must look at your computer screen! Super cool technology that our sales specialist April can help you get! If you have a laptop that is 2 years old you will most likely have one or both of these features.
If you have a little bit of an older Lenovo laptop… then maybe you don’t have these features, but you can look forward to in 3-5 years when you need to upgrade your laptop, you will have a bit of a learning curve with all the new futures but typing in a password might be a thing of the past.
Another thing to look out for is free Wi-Fi in different now open in Ontario patios.
If you like to take your work on the go. Mainly if you need to get out of the house for a few hours. Be careful about using free internet from a restaurant or business. Not that they aren’t secure. Just maybe someone is sitting around the same area and has labeled a Wi-Fi device as for example “Starbucks_Internet” and you login to the free internet connecting your device and revealing all your private information.
Make sure you get the correct Wi-Fi name and address and password from the restaurant or café your relaxing in. It’s just an extra safety precaution you can use to keep you and your companies’ data safe.
We hope you learned something new, maybe your rushing home to reset your administrator password on your modem, maybe you are just resetting all your passwords to something different then your dogs name plus a few numbers 1234 and throwing an @ symbol at the end of it for good measure. Did we just guess your password? We do have a video that highlights how create a strong password – you can watch that here:
As boring as cyber security is, it is VERY important, and we hope that you can take something away, change your password, setup some multifactor authentication and be cyber secure even at home.