How Cybersecurity can Save Your Company from Major Losses and Shutdown

Having Proper Cyber Security is of Paramount Importance – Here are the Best Practices

Since trust is so important, we must do whatever it takes to maintain it. We need to find ways to establish trust between ourselves and potential clients, and maintain that trust once it has been established. A huge part of that is making sure that when people do business with our companies, they don’t risk their personal details being exposed to the world.

Because when something like that happens, the respect people have for your company and the ease with which they will give you the information you need will diminish significantly. That can do incredible harm to your bottom line. In fact, if it happens at the wrong time, it could mean the end of your company.

It’s much better to be insured against these kinds of problems by having the best possible cyber security that you can afford. To make sure this security can function at its best, it’s important to consider some of the biggest problems your security might have.

Your employees

Generally recognized as the weakest link in almost any company is the people who work there. It’s not their fault. The unfortunate problem is that the more difficult a password becomes to crack the more difficult it becomes to remember. What’s more, we only have space for so many different passwords in our head – so obviously we like to repeat variations of the same across different platforms.

Rather than shaking our fists at the incompetence of the human race, we should take steps to help them. The easiest way to do that is to make sure that with standard passwords people don’t have access to sensitive information. This will make it far less likely that phishing attacks and their ilk will work.

By adding an extra level of security where people get short-term passwords for when they need to access sensitive information, a lot of attacks can be prevented.

Training

Another must-do is to have regular sit downs with cybersecurity experts. Here I mean both as an individual and as a company. People need to be reminded frequently of the dangers that are out there and updated as to what the latest tricks are.

Some things they should watch out for:

• Unsolicited requests for information should always be double checked. Preferably by contacting the company directly and asking if it actually came from them.
• When sent to a page by an email or a similar service, they should check the URL to see if it actually matches the regular service.
• Never, ever, give out passwords online or on the phone. No matter however authentic the person on the other end might appear.

Another good idea is to occasionally ask white hat hackers to test your system as well as your employees. By showing people how easily they are fooled by these types of people, they might become more alert when the real deal comes down (And you might be able to figure out who you are more susceptible to this kind of attack).

Only by regularly impressing on people how much risk they run will they stay alert.

Update and decommission stuff you no longer use

Another common problem is that as software is on the market for longer, people discover more and more ways to break into it. For that reason, you have to make sure that you do two things consistently:

1. Update your software to make sure that the holes are plugged.
2. Uninstall the software you no longer use (and therefore are no longer updating).

This way, you’ll make sure that you close as many back-doors as possible and in that way don’t give people who shouldn’t have access to your software. Note that point two is more important than people realize. It is often the case that if you keep software installed even when you’re not using it, people can often still access it. This can leave big gaping holes in an otherwise pristine defense.

Create backups

One of the most common forms of attacks right now is what is known as ransomware. That’s where they lock your computer and then milk you for money to open it up again. That is not a nice way to start your day.

Obviously, you should do whatever you can to make sure that such malware doesn’t find its way onto your network. But you shouldn’t stop there. To make sure that when your network is breached, you don’t lose access to vital information you have on it. Make sure that you create regular backups.

There are plenty of services out there that will do this for you automatically on a regular basis (once a day is generally a good idea). Use these services to make sure that even if you’re locked out of your computer, you can still get to the vital information. This also works well in case a computer decides to kick the bucket all on its own!

Stay alert

Almost every week we hear about some new attack or hack. And the worst part? It’s only the tip of the iceberg. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article that trust is vital. For that reason, a lot of companies don’t decide to let people know that they’ve been hacked. That means that there are a huge number of attacks which go entirely unreported.

Don’t become part of either of those groups. Don’t put yourself in a horrible position where you need to decide if you’re going to warn your customers that they’ve been hacked and take the hit to your reputation or decide to leave them in the dark and more vulnerable as a result. That’s a terrible place to be. Instead, it’s much better to make sure that you’re not hacked, and make sure that the trust that people have put in you is entirely deserved.