2 Factor Authentication. You’ve probably heard of it.

It’s being rolled out more and more aggressively across all sorts of devices, and implemented in all kinds of software.

It’s basically a way of having 2 sets of doors to your sensitive information with different ways of opening them.

It’s vital as a safeguard to prevent malicious hackers from gaining access to your vital data even if they’ve breached other security controls you had in place, such as a password.

Time and time again we’ve seen examples of this saving business’s bacon and preventing much bigger data breaches from occurring.

Just this past week, A Dutch security firm fell victim to a well-executed attack that allowed hackers to take control of its servers, and intercept clients' login credentials and confidential data.

HTTPS certification. Anti-DDOS protections. CAPTCHA verification. All of these constantly evolving and expanding terms for protecting websites. It can get really frustrating having to keep up with the latest cyber-security techniques for your online services. Often an organisation’s website doesn’t collect any credentials, they don't have any payment info and in many cases, the site is simply a static representation of content that rarely changes.

Anti-virus programmes. They’re the key to protecting your computer. As long as you have one in place, you can rest easy, knowing you’ve done your bit to protect yourself from malicious attackers, right? Well, I would certainly recommend installing a reputable anti-virus programme but checking before actually installing it is as vital as implementing it in the first place.

Picture the scene. Just another day at work. Sipping coffee, reading documents. Suddenly, you get an email notification. There’s been a data breach in your company’s network. Another email. Apparently, you’ve been in violation of something called GDPR. What on Earth is that? What does it mean? Another email – this one is a notification of a fine. You open it. How much? Hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Wi-Fi. What would we do without it? The sheer convenience, scale and speed of modern wi-fi standards allow us to transfer and access information in ways that our ancestors couldn’t have even dreamed of. However, there’s often a catch; as much as we try to put it out of our heads, wi-fi is far more vulnerable to security breaches than a wired ethernet connection is. Even when your wi-fi signal is encrypted via relatively strong standards such as WPA-2, malicious hackers are still constantly finding new ways to trick security practices and find a way to access and manipulate your precious, precious data.