Getting hacked is nerve-wracking at the best of times. Becoming a victim during a business trip makes things so much worse. You have to get to the bottom of the attack, do damage control as best you can, and keep higher-ups in the loop. And that’s all on top of your regular work duties and the stress of travel.
We’ll help you make the best out of this thankless situation. Here are the actions you should take to minimize the damage and keep yourself safe that actually work.
Go Offline
Terminating your connection as soon as you suspect an attack is an immediate and effective measure. Public Wi-Fi and the networks you’d find in your hotel or other accommodation can be both monitored and exploited. The effects range from exposing any data you transmit over unsecured sites to infecting your devices with nasty malware.
Going offline will prevent programs that might be running in the background from sending data back to their creators. It also lets you run antivirus and antimalware checks to try and eliminate the threat without risking reinfection.
You now have a conundrum on your hands. Obviously, you shouldn’t connect to the same unsafe network again. However, going online may be the only way to contain the damage if your accounts are at risk.
Switching to a mobile network is the best compromise since they employ more sophisticated protections and are much harder to exploit. This, unfortunately, comes with high roaming charges unless you switch to a local SIM.
eSIMs are a better alternative. If you don’t know what an eSIM is — they are digital version of your generic SIM cards. With eSIMs, you connect through local mobile networks without making the situation even more stressful than it already is by fiddling with physical SIMs. eSIM providers’ data plans cost only a fraction of what you’d pay in roaming charges, yet are large enough to let you do damage control without running out of bandwidth.
Check Account Integrity
A trustworthy internet connection and being reasonably sure your devices are clean is a good start. From there, you can focus on assessing and correcting potential damage to your professional digital assets.
These include project management, communication, and other business-related tools, bank accounts, cloud storage, and any others that the attack might have exposed. Start by ensuring you can still log in and checking for any changes to recovery options like associated email addresses and two-factor authentication.
Proceed by changing passwords for all the accounts you suspect might be affected. They’ll need to be unique and complex to prevent brute force attacks and the harmful cascading effects of shared passwords. Additionally, use a reputable VPN when accessing sensitive accounts, especially on public or unsecured networks. VPNs encrypt your internet traffic and help prevent attackers from peeping at your login details.
However, not every provider offers the same service, that’s why make sure to do your research and pick a tool that’s tailored to your needs. If cost is a problem, you can often find popular brand promotions and deals, just like NordVPN discount codes that are widely available online.
Report the Incident Internally
While you should do everything you can to mitigate the hack’s harmful effects, you’re still just a single person in a vulnerable situation with limited resources at your disposal.
Contact your company’s IT team and fill them in. Share your suspicions and talk them through the steps you’ve taken so they can quickly advise you on what to do next. Having as much info to work with as possible will help the IT team organize an appropriate defense and monitor for suspicious activity, even if an attack on company networks and assets isn’t apparent.
Document Everything
Being the victim of a cyberattack doesn’t excuse you from practicing due diligence in upholding the company’s incident response guidelines and compliance policies. Thoroughly document the attack’s timeline, the effects you observed, what you did in response, etc. Doing this while your memory is still fresh will ensure thoroughness and help your case if and when it’s time to file insurance claims or analyze your conduct.
Contact Financial Institutions
It’s your responsibility to contact the responsible institutions if you suspect that your or the company’s financial accounts were affected. Banks and credit card providers can then assess the severity of the situation. They may need to freeze affected accounts, which, while inconvenient, at least puts a stop to financial fraud. Even if your financial accounts appear to be fine now, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on future statements and transaction histories for fraudulent transactions.
Be on the Lookout for New Threats
Just because the immediate situation seems to be under control doesn’t mean there’s no more danger. If anything, personal and sensitive data hackers could possess may now help them carry out more sophisticated attacks such as spear phishing campaigns.
Monitoring for suspicious emails and social engineering attempts is helpful and essential until you can be sure there are no lingering threats. However, it’s reactive and does nothing to reduce the likelihood of future attacks.
You may want to engage a trustworthy data removal service to be on the safe side. Stolen data might reach data brokers and then get posted publicly online or sold. Data removal services opt you out of any data-gathering schemes and have brokers delete their existing files on you, which greatly helps curb their exposure.
