Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every

Day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 35. This is the second episode in a two-part series about security. First episode is about security in the store. Second, this episode is going to be about digital security. Kevin listened to the first one. I recommend going back to episode 34 and just taking a quick listen. All right, so let's jump right in. Now, a lot of these tips are gonna be great for personal life and professional life, and I recommend sharing them with friends and family. I recommend sharing them with your employees. And, um, it's just basic things that everybody needs to know to make sure they don't, basically, they don't get scammed, they don't get hacked or anything like that. Quick story, I had to go to the city, you know, a couple of weeks ago to meet with someone and I went with one of my friends.

We traveled together. I worked in his WeWork for the morning. And um, you know, we were talking to his boss and it happened to be that his website was down that day. And, you know, we help with websites. So, you know, we, we tried to help. We, we went in there and let's see what's going on. Turns out he was hacked. . Turns out his website was hacked. Someone from China kind of took everything over. His domain was redirected somewhere else, and it took him like, you know, 72 hours proving his identity to his domain registrar and proving his identity to various companies, to, for them to restore everything, give him back to access to his account and everything, you know, got back and, uh, you know, look, you look back on that and you say like, well, it wasn't so bad. He got hacked.

He got his website back. Um, well, I'm here to tell you that it could have been a hundred times worse. And it is so easy to secure yourself to make sure that it doesn't happen. And that's just one example of the things that we'll be able to prevent using these tools. Number one, and I think it's extremely important and people just overlook it, and every website recommends that you do it is make a strong, unique password. Do not make your password. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Do not make your password your name. Do not make your password the name of your store. Make your password super random. Uh, apple even has functionality. Well, they'll create a random password for you. And another thing that's extremely important is use different passwords for different tools. Don't share your passwords with people. Don't give employees your passwords. Don't give your password to a random person on Upwork or Fiver who's helping you with a project.

Don't give out your passwords to anybody. Um, the next thing on that same kind of level is maybe more important to that is enable to factor authentication wherever you can. What that means is anytime you log in from any device that is not your device, you should get a text or an email with your, you know, with a special code that you need to use to log in. And that's really important cuz that means that even if someone has your password, it's just much harder for them to log into your account cuz they also need a break into your email or have access to your phone somehow, which is just probably not gonna happen. Any website that has any, you know, any, any ties to your tech infrastructure or financial stuff should have two factor a identification and you should go in and turn it on.

It's a little annoying when you have to log in sometimes and put in the code, but I guarantee you it's less bad than waking up one morning and seeing that you're missing $42,000 from your bank account. Next thing is really for you, but also for your employees. And that is just generally not trusting people that call your store and tell you something or call you personally tell you something. Whether it's someone telling you that, you know, you have a virus in your computer and they need to get into your computer via screen share to do something or anything like that. Like, you do not want to be giving anybody access to anything unless you know, you know who you're talking to and you really know who you're talking to. So, you know, obvious examples are, you hear about, you know, you hear about old people getting scammed like this all the time, but we've even seen stories of big companies like Google, you know, getting emails from a accounts receivable team saying, Hey, you know, we never got payment for this invoice and someone just pays it because they just trusted.

And why would it be fake? And, uh, it's just extremely important to just question everything. If you're not the one, you know, actively going out and doing something and someone's trying to get something from you, you gotta really verify. And, you know, people say trust, but verify. Don't trust and verify. Also, um, that's extremely important also for your employees. Your employees one day might get an email from you or an email address that looks like you saying that you need help with something or you need them to go buy something for the store, you need them to buy a gift card or something like that. And it's, again, it's just extremely important for them to know that unless they heard it directly from you or unless they called you on the phone or unless they just like confirm something with you that they need to, you know, question everything.

Um, digital attacks are happening more and more often, um, and it's just extremely, extremely important to always protect yourself, protect your businesses, and protect your personal life with some very basic things. And, uh, that's it for this episode. It was a really quick one, but I think like with, you know, by doing some basic things, you could really prevent yourself from 99.9% of the attacks out there, um, because the, the scammers out there are just really preying on people who ignore the basics. So that's it. Looking forward to our next episode. Thanks so much for listening.