Cybercrime is rising to epidemic proportions with an increase in sophistication, and a shift in aim. Hackers now hack to disrupt businesses, to steal data for resale, extortion and damage brands; it’s a growing business.
Reduce cybercrime in vacation rental businesses through passwords
The growth of cybercrime has meant that Credit Card companies work together with the PCI Data Security Standard to put barriers to Credit Card data theft in place, and they have created a set of 12 actions. Within the vacation rental property management industry, we have to adopt and provide measures to protect the safety of customers that trade across the network.
Avantio has a strong commitment to software security, and is constantly striving for ways to improve the security within the online holiday rental management software. Our aim is to provide the best vacation rental management software to protect your customers from data theft and hacking.
Password security
One important yet often overlooked area of security is with passwords. Like in other industries, in many vacation rental property management companies, staff use generic passwords to access computers, and software passwords are either unchanged from the manufacture issue standard, or are altered to easy to break codes, such as ‘password’ and not reviewed.
The list of top 25 passwords for 2016 is cringingly dire, and comparing passwords year on year show that actually, we are learning nothing. Qwerty, 1234 and passw0rd are not passwords, they are invitations for hackers to take a stroll round our software. So what are the golden rules for passwords?
Change regularly, and change immediately after any attempted hack.
- Have different passwords for different software
- Don’t use your name, or your dogs.
- Combine upper and lower case and numbers
- Add a symbol @ # !
- Make an unusual sentence S1m@nwalksonthem0@n
- Use a password manager to generate and store passwords like ‘Lastpass’ or ‘Roboform’
- Use a two-factor authentication process with codes texted to you in your Password Manager. This option is going to become increasingly popular, with the growing number of mobile based devices in property rental companies.
For fun we tried out some passwords in the website howsecureismypassword.net to see how easy it is to find a good password.
Good passwords are not just good housekeeping, but they also form part of the PCI process to ensure that your holiday property rental company is protected from the scourge of hackers, keen to steal your data, your customers data, and destroy your reputation. Take some time to look and improve your passwords, and don’t invite hackers to your vacation rental property company.
