People and businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on online services for their personal and business lives, so it is vital for them to have a secure online presence. A simple civilian might just use a virtual private network to browse. However, to protect your company from cyberattacks, there are a few steps you can take to make sure you aren’t vulnerable.
It is important to remember that there is no “one size fits all solution” for cyberattacks. Each company has its own make-up, business needs, productivity measurements and workflows. When you’re developing a strategy, you need to make sure that it fits the needs of your company. Most cyber defense strategies are designed for three years; however, since hackers and attacks are constantly evolving, you may need to update your system defenses more frequently than that. With the following tips, you’ll have the foundations for a good line of defense.
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Hire Professional Help
To set up a good defense, you need to be well aware of the sorts of threats that you might encounter and how to deal with them. If you run a large company, you can hire an in-house specialist or outsource to a cybersecurity team.
In case you operate a smaller company, this might not be viable for you. Here, you have two options. Depending on your budget, either obtain the knowledge to do this yourself or hire cheap services. All you need to look for is someone who has an online cyber security degree and is a fresh graduate. Even those with minimal experience can make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest means of online protection.
Regulating Any Stored Data
As a business, you’re likely storing the data of all your employees. This can include sensitive information like phone numbers, ID cards, addresses and other personal information. If your business deals with customers or vendors, you’re likely storing their data as well, including financial information. At this point, you have an ethical and a legal obligation to make sure that the data is safeguarded. You should know what data you collect, where it’s stored, who has access to it, and why. Must use computer security policy to ensure that your data is protected. The use of hashes instead of text-based password interfaces is a good way to protect customer data. This means that your website converts text-based passwords into a unique string of characters in the background to allow customers to log in.
Work Closely with Your ISPs
While most internet service providers and cloud vendors do offer security options for their customers, it is common that these features are not enabled by default or that the customer has accidentally applied them incorrectly. Keeping a strong professional relationship with your cloud vendor is extremely essential. You need to make sure your cloud vendor allows you full visibility into your data so you can enact the security policy of your choice. Moreover, many companies have their ISPs host their websites, which allows the sites to run smoothly even under heavy traffic. The downside of this arises when the website is under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. In this case, ISPs usually shut down the site to prevent the attack from moving on to other sites hosted on their servers. It would be your responsibility to have a backup plan in place to deal with this attack, so your website does not need to be down for too long. Facebook lost $7 billion during an outage, so being prepared for those attacks is extremely important.
Segmentation of Access Privileges
If your business is cloud based or hybrid in its data storage, it would be a great idea to create segmentation within the structure. In simple terms, this means that each form of privileged user access is placed in its own sandbox. If you have a junior worker whose access data is compromised, the hacker will only be able to access as much data as his access point allows. For instance, the access privilege of a customer service manager in your company would not include the important data that the company’s accountant can access. Many hackers abuse their access privileges, but if you segment your data, you can prevent them from moving laterally through it even if a breach occurs at a single point of entry. It is even more crucial if you have employees who work from home, as their personal internet connections may not be as secure as the company’s.
Be Prepared for a Breach
As the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. It isn’t always possible to prevent a cyberattack on your company’s resources due to advances in hacking techniques. Even if you take all possible steps, you should keep a backup plan in case your defenses fall short. Create backups of your data so that you can recover them without paying ransomware, obtain cyber insurance, notify the authorities and other stakeholders, and prevent further data breaches. Should your company be the victim of a successful attack, it is important to learn from the attack so that you can improve the security of your site and cloud services, and make sure that a similar attack doesn’t happen in the future.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these 5 key tips will help you deal with the majority of cyberattacks. In addition, you should also ensure that you communicate properly between your company’s different departments and that you give each employee the right protocols to follow. In Cybersecurity, the landscape is ever-changing. Although these suggestions mentioned above can cover the basics, it would be important for you to gather your intelligence and adapt the plan to meet the specific requirements of your business.