October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so if your funeral home hasn’t thought about cybersecurity, now is the perfect time to start.

With your client families entering personal information on your funeral home’s website, you want to make sure that information doesn’t get into the wrong hands. Even your social media accounts could potentially get hacked if you’re not careful. But by taking some precautions, you can protect your accounts and client families’ information.

Below are some ways to keep your funeral home’s website, social media accounts, and other online accounts and information safe.

Have an SSL-Secured Website

An SSL — Secure Sockets Layer — certificate encrypts the data sent between your web server and browser. It protects sensitive information like credit card information, social security numbers, login credentials, and other personal information.

Websites that are SSL-secured have HTTPS at the beginning of their URL rather than HTTP. This means that websites with HTTPS have a secure connection. Google also favors websites with HTTPS, so your funeral home’s website will appear higher in the Google search results than funeral home websites that aren’t SSL-secured.

To learn more about SSL and how Frazer-powered websites offer SSL protection, read this SSL article.

Protect Your Social Media Accounts

Make sure that you read through and understand your funeral home’s social media page’s privacy and security settings. It also helps to have a designated social media person for your funeral home. If that’s not possible, you can assign people distinct roles to give them limited access.

For example, Facebook lets you assign different roles such as administrator and editor, which have different levels of access. Learn more about the options in this Facebook Page roles article.

Some accounts also have the option of sending a verification code via text or email before granting access. On Facebook, you can sign up for alerts when there’s an unrecognized login attempt to your account. Check out this Facebook article to learn how to sign up.

Other social media best practices to protect your accounts are not to click any suspicious messages or links. These suspicious messages likely have many spelling and grammatical errors. You should always report suspicious activity that you come across. Another best practice is to create strong passwords for your social media accounts — which we’ll talk more about in the next section.

Create Strong Passwords

Create strong passwords for all your funeral home’s accounts and change them every few months. Although this may seem excessive, it can help prevent your accounts from being hacked.

Also, don’t give them out to too many people and make sure you create different passwords for all of your accounts. Choose passwords that are unique and aren’t easy to guess. By including some unique symbols and both upper and lowercase letters, your password is more secure.

Secure Your Computers

Make sure to install a security software program on your funeral home’s computers — such as McAfee or Norton — to protect your computers from viruses and hackers. Also, keep your computer and internet browsers up-to-date. According to Jessica Koth in the Director article We’ve Been Hacked, these updates may contain important virus protection updates.