The FBI is warning about heightened risks of ransomware and other attacks during the holidays.

So, here are some tips to help you with your hack-free life during the holidays.

Before you leave the office (or your home):

• Double-check that everyone’s passwords are secure and have been updated recently. Using a password manager makes a big difference.
• Turn on multi-factor authentication (also known as 2-factor) on all systems that support it. This trick alone will keep hackers out of systems.
• Make sure everyone knows not to post information about vacations or their holiday plans on social media.
• If your employees are going to use their home computers during the holidays, make sure they are using approved anti-malware software.
• This is one of the few times that you/employees should be using a VPN connection directly to the office/home.
• Make sure any inbound VPN connections have access restricted to the bare minimum of internal servers. Also, enable multi-factor authentication.
• Shut down any computers or servers that don’t absolutely need to remain on during the holiday.
• Disable any inbound services directly reachable from the Internet.
• Make sure everyone is aware of your incident response plan, and that you run through the plan with your key people.

And during the holiday

• Have someone monitor any systems that are left on for hacker activity.