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Published by Programme B
Is your hotel’s online presence vulnerable to online threats? Is your customer feeling unsecured about booking your hotel online? Leave your worries aside and follow these tips to protect your online presence. Of course, you could also look to work alongside managed IT companies that can help you to keep all of your technology in order. However, it is a good idea to have a brief idea on how to protect yourself.
In this post, you will find how to educate yourself and your employees on cyber threats and stay secure during the times of cyber-attacks. We all knew a common saying, “Prevention is better than cure.” To prevent your management from being attacked, you need to know some of the preventive measures and when to imply them.
Let’s read it from today’s post and secure your hotel website from such threats.
Train Employees on Phishing attack & accountability:
Phishing attacks have become the most populous ones in recent history as the attack involved victims who revealed their credentials or ended up downloading malicious malware. An analysis stated that a huge percentage of phishing attack was unrecognizable and most of them were through emails. In 2018, a couple of hotels and guest houses were featured on booking.com which were victims of phishing emails. These hotel authorities ended up with users being sent with emails that instructed them to share their payment details.
These emails are mostly predicted as the ones that hold links and ask the user to click them. This does not stop there; hackers have stepped ahead of the edge and started building fake websites that trick victims to enter sensitive information. The intruders spend a lot of time on these websites building them to gain authenticity among users and make them indistinguishable from the real ones.
This is the case where your hotel staffs need to be attentive and avoid insisting your customers to pay or book online. As your staff may recommend your website over a call to your customer and that your customer may end up on another website and get things done.
Replying your customers with links for booking online and sharing booking tickets over mail are also under risk. You attempt to lead your customer to an undeniable situation of sharing their details on the link. Hence it is highly recommended to educate or train your employees on phishing attacks and its accountability.
DDOS attack makes the website unavailable:
A DDoS attack is a Distributed Denial of Service which highly targets on websites and brings them down by flooding the network with fake traffic. In case, if the end resource is vulnerable to such attacks, a small amount of traffic would be more than enough for the intruders to slow down the website.
The ultimate goal of the DDoS attacks is as follows,
- To reduce the traffic of the website making it tucked with fake traffic
- Slow down the website to respond to genuine requests
- Make it completely disabled and shut down the services for requests that reach the website genuinely
Reasons why hotel websites are attacked?
There are a few reasons that these attacks are executed, and they are achieved to reduce the competition in the industry of hotel management. On the other hand, there are two other reasons that intruders or hackers concentrate, and they are as follows,
- Hotels are open to attacks as they maintain least security.
- Hotels store a large amount of data including transactions
Hotels are open to attack:
The biggest and the blended mistake that most management commit is, they fail at security. As hotel management does not highly concentrate on online transactions or deliverables, they consider security a lighter thing. Hence, they end up at such attacks. Every hotel management which handles its services online should consider security at its highest.
Hotels store a large amount of data including transaction:
Earlier booking hotels were one-way interactions. It was either made through calls or direct bookings. Later in the advancements and new inventions, the hotel industry sought to find its way through online methods.
The hotel management became open not only to its customers and various other commodities; they also started to store a large amount of data. Controlling this data was simple with computer passwords and controlled hard drive destruction. But in later days, hotels started to make online transactions possible for their clients, in that customers would send financial and personal information to book their rooms in advance.
Understanding the path hole, intruders and hackers started to find their way to collecting the most essential data from such hotels through DDoS attacks and even collecting transaction details. This led to trust breaks among customers. This is where security becomes the highest requirement for hotel management as well.
Use HTTPS & Why
By understanding all the above hacks that your hotel management would face your online presence should be secure enough to have your customers in. Having a secure website is the most helpful thing that you can do to your customers to make their bookings. So, how do you achieve providing them with a secure website?
Install an SSL certificate to your hotel’s website:
Before we proceed with installing an SSL certificate, let us understand what an SSL certificate is.
SSL certificate:
The most important aspect to run an online business securely is by installing an SSL certificate to it. An SSL certificate is a Secure Socket layer that builds the basis of trust by making a secure connection. The SSL certificate works with the help of a private and public key which ensures the encryption of online data. You can obtain an SSL certificate from SSL2BUY.
Once you obtain your SSL certificate you need to get it installed to your website to ensure the security of your hotel website.
Why is it necessary to install an SSL certificate?
There are three major reasons to install an SSL certificate to your hotel business online,
- Google has made SSL certificate one of the ranking factors.
- SSL certificate grabs the user’s trust
- Lack of security will be stressed for a business
Cloud Security Monitoring Analytics for monitoring:
Monitoring is one of the most typical components of management. Automated solutions are used to supervise virtual and physical servers to measure data and applications to ensure there are no security threats. This assures the cloud infrastructure while minimizing common data breaches.
Advantages of cloud security monitoring:
- Cloud monitoring helps to identify potential security vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure.
- Effective cloud monitoring can avoid companies to suffer the threat of losing data and ensures data transfer and storage.
- By storing data on the cloud, loss of business can be prevented, and customer frustration can be reduced.
- Cloud storage and monitoring provide many benefits from accessibility to better customer experience.
- Cloud monitoring has enabled hotel management to mitigate risks and take advantage of the benefits of cloud monitoring and storage.
Restrict mobile device usage for sharing data:
Strictly educate your employees about using mobile devices to share data. As insisted above, cloud storage can make the process simpler and more secure. As mobile devices, these days are vulnerable to data breaches and typical online threats it is highly recommended to avoid or restrict mobile devices to share data.
Claim your hotel cyber security insurance:
An ideal method of securing user or customer data is by protecting them before an attack. Unfortunately, if your hotel data is under threat, cyber security insurance can take hold of it. They are handled with customer notification and credit monitoring.
Any breaches that involve sensitive data like customer sensitive information, credit card details, and social security numbers can be publicized and brought into customer knowledge. And hotel management must provide ongoing credit monitoring to its affected customers.
Wrap up:
It is very much important to secure both physical and virtual data of your hotel management to ensure customer satisfaction. Making use of these strategies and knowing about them can help you involved with a proactive approach to cyber-attacks. Measuring your hotel’s online presence and securing it with SSL certificate may help you gain trust among your customers.