You’ve worked long and hard to build up your business into a successful enterprise, so it stands to reason that you would protect your business as best you can. This includes physical theft and cyber theft, that could potentially cost you serious amounts of money in damage, downtime and the embarrassment of some cybercrime.
Here we look at the best prevention techniques, how to teach yourself and your staff to be more savvy to the threats out there, and some services that need to be thought about whether you are a small, medium or large-scale business.
Be Savvy
In the majority of cases, security breaches in your business will come from the actions of you or your staff being tricked into opening emails or unwittingly giving out information. Cybercrime has developed over the years into a sophisticated operation to dupe as many people as possible. Phishing emails – sent to get readers to click on a link directing them to a website that will capture personal information that can be used to extort money, or to download a PDF that contains a virus – are common, so it’s best to educate your staff to recognise these emails.
Some key things to warn your staff about of include:
Passwords – When employees use short and easy-to-crack passwords, this makes the hackers work very easy to do. If your employees are also using the same passwords across several accounts, this is another red flag. Educate your staff to create long passwords with a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.
Emails – The key thing with emails is to be cautious of unknown senders. These top tips from Which? are a great start to re-education in your business:
- Check the ‘from’ address – a scam email usually has a bizarre email address behind what looks like a genuine sender name.
- Is it personal? – Although some scam emails are getting better at including people’s names, most are still using ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello’.
- Contact information and dates – Does the signature look legit? Hover over the website address(es) to see where it links to.
- Check branding – Keep an eye on the quality of branded logos. Does it match the last genuine email you received from them?
- Is the linked website legitimate? – Open a new tab and do a search for the company sending the email. Does its website have the same URL address?
A training day on cyber security every so often could be the best move you make to secure your business from fraudulent scams.
Back Up
Another key issue is to back up all the work your business does. The most common, and advisable, course of action is to use cloud computing – also known as ‘the cloud’ – which is delivery on-demand computing resources.
To take this on yourself is expensive and time-consuming, described in a recent BBC article as ‘chewing up IT resources’. If you can outsource this hardware and software to a specialist tech company, this will free up time and resources for you to focus on the business areas that can increase your profit margin.
The article also discusses the worries of giving up your data to a third party, and that even though you are trusting another company to look after your security, the data is still your responsibility. So do not get complacent – make sure you are keeping your business as security conscious as possible.
Security Breach
If the worst should happen and your company experiences a security breach, there a few things to keep in mind including dealing with the problem itself, and preventing this breach from happening again.
Protection – To give your computer systems the best protection available, be sure to look into installing some decent antivirus programs. Once you have these, it is up to you to make sure your systems are regularly up to date with the latest version of antivirus.
Servings as a sentry to your network, firewalls give that extra layer of protection to your sensitive business information and contacts. Your business may include holding the personal information of others. If you do not protect it sufficiently, your reputation could be at stake.
Make sure that the latest operating system is being used on your computers. Developers add in new protections with each version, so you are best to have everything up to date.
Ransomware – A malicious software that blocks access to the victim’s data or gives a threat to delete the data or publish it to cause embarrassment. Until a ransom is paid to the hackers, the threat remains.
This type of attack is personal and causes lots of stress to the person or business affected. There are several types of ransomware out there, including a ransomware attack pyramid scheme that gives victims the chance to get out of paying a ransom if they send a scam email on to people they know.
If you are affected by this type of cybercrime, there are companies on hand to deal with the breach and stop this threat from happening again. One of the best ransomware removal services is Monster Cloud. The company can also do some testing to see how secure your systems are by trying to hack them – an excellent preventative measure.
