Seeing as how the number of cyber attacks is increasing every year, being concerned for your company’s online security is absolutely a must. The number of cyberattacks rose exponentially in the past few years, which left business owners with only a handful of options to combat these threats.
Because cyberattacks are not something that you can just brush off, no matter how small your business is, you should have a strategy in place to prevent them.
Luckily, cybersecurity awareness is one of these strategies. Although malicious breaches and hacks might sound too elaborate, a simple employee error could make your organization vulnerable to those attacks. This is why it is crucial that you increase your staff’s cybersecurity awareness. Here is how you can do that.
Training
The most direct method with which you can increase cybersecurity awareness is with formal training programs that focus on the subject. When you provide formal training for your employees on that particular subject and introduce them to all the practices that can help them avoid cyberattacks, there will be no chance for security breaches in the first place.
Every business owner must know the vulnerabilities in their security systems, so securing these vulnerabilities can only be done by making your employees aware of them and also the methods to prevent them.
Since phishing and social engineering attacks make up a large portion of all security breaches, formal cybersecurity training should cover these subjects and ways to avoid them. Doing so will reduce the possibility that your employees fall victim to these schemes in the future.
Testing
Not complimenting training with testing can be a bit counterproductive. Since you want to instill these beliefs and help your employees understand the risks associated with cybercrime, it is crucial that you test your employees’ knowledge from time to time to ensure that they don’t fall prey to hacker traps and bring the whole integrity of the company down with them.
To do so, the folks at D Solutions Group advise business owners to test their employees in different ways. For example, they can do assessments at the end of the training to test their knowledge, or they can send fake phishing emails to them to see whether or not they’ll actually fall for them. This is a good way of reminding your employees of the importance of cybersecurity and finding gaps in their knowledge to mend it.
Automatic Backups
Despite all of these efforts, cybercriminals might still make their way into your database, wipe all of your information, which can put a considerable dent in your business’s integrity. In case that happens, it would be best that you backup all of your information.
Doing manual backup will be a monotonous task, not to mention that it will take a lot of time. Therefore, you have to make sure that you put automatic backups on all computers on your company’s premises and ensure that these backups are done periodically. You should also back up important files one time per day, even if you have to do so manually. Backups can be either done on a material object, like clone hard drives, or cloud space, like cloud drive.
Encrypt Your Data
To add an extra layer of security to all your information, data encryption is the key. As you might already know, once a hacker gains access to your database, they can do as they please with the data they find there (social security numbers, banking information, etc.) without caring how devastating that could be for hundreds of people. Data encryption will secure this sensitive information, so you should invest in encryption tools and add them to all your computers.
Prepare for a Data Breach
None of us can really tell what can happen in the future. Despite your efforts, you might still find your company under a cyberattack, so the best way to fend off these attacks will be by preparing for them. Therefore, you have to set up a plan to ensure that serious action will be taken when your security is breached.
Your plan must include effective methods that focus on improving organizational structures and customer confidence to reduce any reputational or financial damage entailed by a security breach. You should also test your plan thoroughly in order to identify any areas of weakness and deal with them accordingly.
Cybersecurity is now one of the most trending topics in the world of business, and for a good reason. If you don’t have enough resources or cybersecurity awareness, know that you are vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. Make sure that you contact a cybersecurity company to identify areas of weakness in your security defense and deal with them promptly. Another clever solution for increased security online is blockchain. Technology like Chainlink is decentralized blockchains intended to be used to facilitate the transfer of tamper-proof data from off-chain sources to on-chain smart contracts. The increase in popularity of this technology can also be seen in the chainlink price prediction.
