Cybersecurity for Your Business, Mitigating the Threats

Whether you are a small or medi­um-sized busi­ness own­er or man­ag­er, threats to the com­put­er and online secu­ri­ty of your com­pa­ny are real and change every day. Some­times it’s hard to stay ahead of the curve when you have oth­er con­cerns and chal­lenges on your plate. But it’s impor­tant to have a Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty plan to pre­vent your com­pa­ny from being dam­aged by a secu­ri­ty breach. Small busi­ness­es are more and more vic­tims of data breach­es. Accord­ing to experts, these con­di­tions arise as small busi­ness­es are not updat­ing their secu­ri­ty con­trols reg­u­lar­ly. Here are a few things you can put in place to mit­i­gate the secu­ri­ty risks to your firm.
In almost every busi­ness, your data is an incred­i­bly valu­able asset to your busi­ness, con­se­quent­ly, it’s also valu­able to hack­ers and thieves. Learn more here on some mea­sures to take to keep your busi­ness secure.
1. Ongo­ing aware­ness and Cybere­cu­ri­ty train­ing of your employ­ees is para­mount. It is a proven fact that a major cause of data breach­es are employ­ees in small and mid-size busi­ness. This is usu­al­ly because of a lack of aware­ness regard­ing data secu­ri­ty. Employ­ees usu­al­ly make inno­cent mis­takes as they are not aware of how hack­ers oper­ate. These inno­cent mis­takes can be very cost­ly, and for­tu­nate­ly many can be pre­vent­ed with reg­u­lar edu­ca­tion.
Before giv­ing out any con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion, employ­ees should check the legit­i­ma­cy of the per­son or enti­ty request­ing the infor­ma­tion. When work­ing online beware of web­sites that don’t hold an SSL cer­tifi­cate. Steer clear of sus­pi­cious links and online ads, web­sites and emails. Emails may seem inno­cent, but attach­ments should nev­er be opened from unknown peo­ple and sources. Hack­ers post links, dis­guised as a trust­ed source, to get hold of con­fi­den­tial data. When employ­ees click on that par­tic­u­lar link a virus is installed on their com­put­er. This is how they get all the con­fi­den­tial data. Con­se­quent­ly, reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed virus pro­tec­tion soft­ware for Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty is a good invest­ment.
2. Pro­tect your data using strong pass­words. When new staff are hired or let go, pass­words should be changed. Hack­ers often attack pass­words to get a hold of poten­tial data. So to pro­tect your devices like busi­ness com­put­ers, mobile devices, net­works and accounts, the employ­ees should change the default pass­word to a strong one. A com­plex pass­word is where a vari­ety of char­ac­ters are used. The pass­word should be changed quar­ter­ly at a min­i­mum.
3. Access to busi­ness com­put­ers should only be for autho­rized employ­ees. You should cre­ate a spe­cif­ic user account for each employ­ee. This cre­ates account­abil­i­ty. This will also help restrict access to your busi­ness com­put­ers. It is also essen­tial to lim­it the net­work access for com­put­ers in or around your loca­tion. Soft­ware that restricts and tracks attempts to access sen­si­tive data, such as cus­tomers cred­it or iden­ti­ty info, should send alarms to man­age­ment.
4. Main­tain secu­ri­ty on mobile devices. If your employ­ee uses a mobile device to access com­pa­ny infor­ma­tion while work­ing, it increas­es your expo­sure to hack­ing and data breach­es. Many com­pa­nies now allow their employ­ees to use their own device at work which increas­es the expo­sure to mal­ware and many oth­er issues relat­ed to Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. Make sure your employ­ees are using all the secu­ri­ty fea­tures avail­able on their devices, includ­ing pass­word or fin­ger­print pro­tec­tion. Phones should be set to lock down after short peri­ods of inac­tiv­i­ty. If pos­si­ble, It is bet­ter not to access busi­ness data on a per­son­al device and to only access it on the offi­cial device which is equipped with cyber­se­cu­ri­ty tools.
5. For many small busi­ness­es, it is required to out­source some busi­ness ser­vices to 3rd par­ty oper­a­tors. This includes oper­a­tions such as cred­it card pro­cess­ing, pay­roll, some­times even to super­vise the company’s secu­ri­ty func­tions. This, of course, cre­ates a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. The onus falls on the busi­ness man­age­ment to ensure 3rd par­ty ven­dors hired, are also doing reg­u­lar due dili­gence when it comes to secu­ri­ty. Thus, before work­ing with any third par­ty, it is essen­tial to appro­pri­ate­ly check their secu­ri­ty stan­dards and choose ven­dors that are com­mit­ted to reg­u­lar­ly updat­ing secu­ri­ty poli­cies and pro­ce­dures.
In sum­ma­ry, often the biggest threat to secu­ri­ty is com­pla­cen­cy. As daunt­ing as it sounds at times to cre­ate secure busi­ness prac­tices, it is much eas­i­er and cheap­er to imple­ment safe prac­tices than recov­er­ing from a secu­ri­ty hack or breach. The Ben­jamin Franklin axiom that “an ounce of pre­ven­tion is worth a pound of cure” is as true today as it was when Franklin made the quote.