Mark Davidson, IT manager at the Western Reserve Area Agency on Aging, joined host Tyler Kern on this episode of the Software & Technology Podcast to discuss the importance of protecting business and personal data. Every day people are sharing information over social networks, and how much of that personal information is being shared and disseminated is an area Davidson cautioned listeners to consider.

Davidson said if passwords are easily guessable and tied to familiar information that can be pieced together from social media interactions, people could be opening themselves up to hackers.

“People can get into your bank accounts; people can get into your social accounts,” Davidson warned.

“A huge tip,” he offered, “is to change yaour passwords regularly and don’t use the same one for everything. If a hacker gets your email password, and it is the same one as your bank password, they now have both.”

Dual-factor identification is something Davidson recommended to protect personal information and reduce the ability of hackers to penetrate an account.

Another critical tool in the cybersecurity war chest is the principle of least privilege (POLP.) Davidson said this practice means people only have access to the things on their network that they need to do their job. Doing this can limit the scope of an attack if someone in a company does get hacked.

Another tip Davidson provided is to create long passwords and consider using sentences broken up with characters. With the increase of online threats, it’s more important than ever to keep business and personal IT safe.