Contrary to popular belief, small businesses are at a greater risk of being attacked by hackers. Big companies have the resources, expertise, and financial strength to spend on cybersecurity, which is not the case with small businesses. Cybercriminals are constantly looking for new means to hack into systems or steal data, which can be used against your company in numerous ways. In this this post, we are sharing some of the best steps that can be taken for ensuring cybersecurity.
Enlist your cyber risks
This is the first step in creating a cybersecurity plan. Keep in mind that such a list comes in handy in training your employees, who are on the frontline of managing networked devices and assets. Make sure that you have considered all current threats that are looming large on small and large businesses alike. For instance, different types of malware are current under the scanner, such as ransomware, trojan, and viruses.
Hirecybersecurity experts
You need a team of cybersecurity experts to guide your small business for developing policies, an incident response plan, and training your employees. Employees must be trained on aspects like safe browsing and finding suspicious emails and attachments. Working with cybersecurity experts will also help your company in finding internal threats that may potentially lead to a security breach.
Engage ethical hackers
Many big companies, including Facebook and Google, have bug bounty programs, which are meant to find flaws within their apps, systems, networks, devices and servers. Hiring ethical hackers doesn’t have to be expensive, as long as you run the right kind of program. Ethical hackers will be only paid if they can find a bug or issue.
Follow standard password protection measures
Hackers often rely on backdoor exploit and weak passwords to gain unauthorized access into systems and networked devices. There are basic password protection measures that can help in preventing such breaches. Ensure all default passwords and usernames after product/app/software deployment, and ask employees to create strong passwords, with special characters, uppercase and lowercase letters. Managing too many passwords can be hard for employees, for which a password management tool can be used.
Security to the next level
Finally, consider additional protection where needed. Multifactor authentication and lockout feature can be extremely handy for privilege accounts and for sensitive devices, such as IP cameras. Cybersecurity is about being a step ahead of hackers, and for that, proactive measures are more than necessary. Do not take these threats for granted.
