Establishing an online presence of your business is an excellent way to solidify your company brand and help open new avenues to advertise your service or product. Exposing your company online may make you vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Along with creating a powerful advertising and marketing plan, you have to include the development of a cybersecurity policy.
A cyber-attack can be damaging and detrimental no matter the extent of the breach. If compromised, you could lose data, info and money. Most importantly, you jeopardize the credibility you have built with your customers. This can affect your authenticity and brand loyalty. It is estimated that as much as 43 percent of online cyber-attacks target small businesses. This is because they are less likely to take into consideration the online security threats when developing their teams and policies.
The good news is that there are security firms that specialize and develop strategies to safeguard your business and mitigate risks, regardless of the company’s size. With a vast selection of services, they provide resources to protect the infrastructure, cloud, and data to help achieve cyber resiliency. Conveniently, these solutions may be rolled together into a customized package designed to fulfill the needs of individual companies.
You would be wise to consider enlisting the support of a cybersecurity specialist to protect your company's future. In the meantime, here are some general tips you can follow to minimize the risk of cyber threats.
Establish a Well Defined and Readily Accessible Cybersecurity Policy
There needs to be a cybersecurity policy in place and distributed efficiently to the workforce. Regularly scheduled training should be provided to new hires and established employees. This should include the procedure for wrongful actions and due processes.
This policy should detail permissions and procedures to follow in order to access the Internet, instructions for generating secure passwords, and information on how to recognize phishing scams. All possible scenarios should be addressed so there is no room for improvisation that may lead to incorrect decisions. Meaningful use of the internet needs to be minimized or explicitly confined within specified parameters. In addition, the policy must outline the chain of command and steps to follow when identifying security threats.
The cybersecurity policy needs to explicitly outline the management of any sensitive information to ensure that it always stays secure. This may include restricting access to information.
Encryption of sensitive information must become the standard of your workforce. When in doubt, there is nothing wrong in going one step further to avoid exposing content. Encryption ensures that even if your information is accessed by a third party, they will not be able to read it because they cannot present the proper authorization code. It keeps files and emails strictly confidential. Leaks happen whenever a breakdown in encryption happens somewhere along the timeline. Using it as a standard procedure, ensures that you are always protected.
Engage your Team in Trainings Regarding Established Security Policies
As part of the security framework, technologic strategies focus mainly on largest risks. To succeed help is also needed daily from employees, to tackle smaller day to day threats and avoid breaches that malicious hackers could exploit.
Invest in technology to become cyber resilient but have a savvy team of employees. Training should be mandatory for all. Should be completed on a yearly or semi-yearly basis.
Provide regular reminders and be aware that security threats evolve daily. Workforce’s knowledge of practices needs to be updated as well. Trainings should cover the different kinds of cyber and social attacks, but also teach preventative practices.
Five critical cybersecurity training tips to get your employees up to date and in turn ensure the protection of your business data.
Social engineering: This is a term used to manipulate others so they give up their important information. It is commonly referred to as phishing. Based on an investigation report by Verizon, 93 percent of data breaches are as a result of pretexting and phishing.
Password management: According to a research conducted in 2017 by OneLogin, less than 31 percent of IT services require their employees to change passwords monthly. Password management is a major challenge for business owners as it regards cyber security.
Email usage: Most businesses depend on emails daily for both external and internal communications. Since emails are primary delivery methods for computer malware, employees need to know how to responsibly use them.
Unauthorized software: A quick way for viruses to infect your computers is by downloading software from sources that are unknown. Even software that appears innocent such as a game could have ransomware, spyware or other malicious codes.
Using the internet: Carry out training for your employees to avoid opening unfamiliar links on the internet or from sources that seem suspicious. Such links might download malicious software that could potentially infect your computers and put them at risk.
Finally, workers need to know how to prevent an attack from spreading after it is launched and the appropriate steps to follow. The quicker the system is shut down, the lower the chance of significant losses.
We hope these tips help your organization evaluate and improve any uncover area!
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