The holiday season is a great time of year for people to reconnect with friends and family. Unfortunately, it is also a good time for thieves and other criminals. From using secure complete payment solutions to not letting temporary workers access to your network, there are things you can do to be more secure. The security company Optivandnbsp;put out these tips to help businesses survive the holiday season unscathed.

• Be careful about what your temporary staff can access. The holiday season is a big time for the hiring of temporary staff. This is well known to criminals. They exploit the need for a lot of workers to get access to businesses’ data and inventory. Be careful about what you give any temporary staff access to both in terms of your data and your merchandise.
• Be extra careful about phishing. More emails go out with the intention of getting information fraudulently at this time of the year. Train your people how to recognize authentic email messages and remind them only to open messages from sources they know. Remind them to be careful about the websites they visit and to only shop on known and trusted sources. If the URL is suspect, they should avoid it.
• Secure your physical location. Your complete payment solutions are not the only vulnerable areas of your business. If you are expecting any deliveries, make sure someone at your company can sign for them. Thieves steal deliveries from businesses and homes. Any areas that have important data or information you do not want others to access should be secured. Pay attention to who is coming and going from your space.
• Be careful when making payments. There are a lot of ways your data can be accessed when making a payment. There are ways to make making payment more secure. There are complete payment solutions available to make these transactions more secure. When you use a mobile device to pay for something, you are better off using your credit card’s official application. Closely watch your cards and accounts. Tell you staff to do this with their home accounts as well.
• Back up your data. This is something all businesses should do but not all follow through with it. The problem of ransomware has not gone away,. This is when criminals get into your system, lock you out of your data and then demand money. They can even go so far as to destroy all of your data. If you have complete backups of your data, they cannot hurt you.
• Be careful with wire transfers. Set policies so that employees do not get taken in by fake requests for money from your business. One safeguard is having at least two executives at your company be required to authorize the transfer of any amount of money.
• Watch out for fraud with your integrated POS system. This is a big area of concern at this time of year. Even if you use the most secure complete payment solutions, you need to check your POS system and the cash register often. POS fraud is a big problem and is often hard to spot.
• Avoid third party shopping applications. If your staff must shop online, they should do it only on official merchant sites.
• Secure your internet devices. Cyber threats have gone up as the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown. Have your employees update their applications as recommended and use passwords that are strong and secure. You should go further and just make sure all your third party applications remain updated.
• Do not overwork your staff. When people are tired and stressed they are more likely to make a mistake. You can prevent some of this by making your staff take adequate time off. This is not the time to make them work extra shifts.
• Never reuse passwords. This is something a lot of people do because it is easy. It is also how a lot of hackers get in. You can set your systems to not allow passwords that have been used to be used again.

All of these suggestions are ones that should be followed throughout the year but are more critical during the holidays when a lot of people let their guard down. Thieves and hackers never let theirs down and neither should you.