Cybersecurity Awareness Month
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and NIPSCO is encouraging customers to take steps to keep personal information safe from cyber criminals. The potential dangers can present themselves in many forms, including phony calls, emails and text messages.
“Maintaining the confidentiality of customer information is critically important to all of us at NIPSCO,” said Mike Hooper, NIPSCO President. “Some of the measures we have implemented include extensive and continuous training of our
employees on how to safeguard customer data, amplifying our data encryption and bolstering our incident response capabilities.”
“We also want to empower customers with ways to protect themselves as they utilize NIPSCO’s digital channels – our mobile app, website, live chat feature – as well as calls to our Customer Care Center,” added Hooper.
Here are some actions to help customers build their cyber defenses as they access their accounts and communicate with NIPSCO:
- Password security (for website and mobile app): Change passwords often and don’t re-use old ones. Consider using a password manager instead of re-using passwords on multiple sites.
- Check the lock (for our website): Make sure you’re logging into the correct website and look for a lock icon in the URL in the address bar – it should appear to the left of the URL. This indicates that data exchanged
between your computer and our server is encrypted.
- Don’t be fooled (when calling NIPSCO’s Customer Care phone line and using the chat feature):
- Our customer representatives will not:
- Ask for your password over the phone or through live chat; or
- Ask for your credit card number through live chat.
- Our customer representatives will not:
- If being asked questions that seem suspicious, we encourage customers to disconnect the call completely and call our number as it appears on the website or bill to ensure they are speaking to an authorized representative.
- Our Customer Care Center phone number is 1-800-4-NIPSCO, which operates Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. CT.
- Think before clicking (for website and alert emails/texts): Don’t click on links from unsolicited emails. If able to see where a link is directing to before clicking on it, do so. If suspicious of a link, don’t click on it.
- Keep software updated (for mobile app and website): Ensure browser and operating systems are updated with the most recent software versions.
Additional tips:
- Never share private, sensitive data: Don’t provide a NIPSCO account number, social security number and/or banking information to unconfirmed sources. We only ask for a social security number when establishing new service or verifying a customer’s identity.
- Verify account status: Cyber criminals may insist that an account is past due, even when payments are up to date. Customers can verify the account status by logging into their NIPSCO account online.
- Know the payment options: To more easily spot a potential scam, learn more about our NIPSCO payment options.
To view account details, learn about payment options and more, visit NIPSCO.com.
