Whether it’s your business or personal email in the cloud we strongly recommend turning on the built in security feature of most email platforms – Two Factor Authentication. This simple step will virtually ensure you do not get hacked (nothing is 100% safe!!), consider for one moment what would happen if criminals accessed your emails, so much of your personal and business life is stored there or flows through there, possibly enough information to steal your identity or enough to embark on a whaling scam, where the scammers pretend to be you and get one of your staff or friends to send money to a bank account on your authority (this is not uncommon and easy enough to perpetrate especially if your business lacks sufficient internal controls, such as two signatories on the bank account) these scams can be devastating for your business.
In addition, cloud accounting platforms such as Xero utilise the Two factor Authentication system, we would recommend ensuring ALL your users enable this, if you logon to Xero and navigate to the Users page you will see who has this enabled and who doesn’t, criminals who hack into your online accounting software are not interested in your accounting data, they will typically change the bank account you print on your invoices and have some of your customers pay them instead…so beware!
Once enabled, Two factor authentication can become invisible so it’s not a matter of having to actively use two factor authentication every time you log in, many platforms will only insist on it when you use a different device, others will let you set a default time frame before the software insists you again authenticate.