More and more businesses are suffering from data breaches and malicious software infections with each passing year — this is the price they pay for relying so heavily on the internet. Whether it’s caused by clever cybercriminals hacking into private networks or careless employees leaving these gateways open, cybercrime is undoubtedly on the rise.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t defend your business against it. To see what you need to do in order to set about that all-important task, be sure to read on.
Identify your threats
The first thing you must do in your bid to prevent cybercrime is identify what potential threats your business is faced with. Quite simply, how can you expect to defend yourself against a problem if you don’t understand the size and scale of it? Asking yourself ‘what is ransomware‘ when you are in the middle of actually being held to ransom by a cybercriminal could prove detrimental to you-you need to know how to deal with this problem before it befalls you so that you can sort it out before it escalates.
Here is a list of potential threats you could face alongside ransomware:
- Denial-of-service
- Password attack
- Eavesdropping attack
- SQL injection
- Trojans
- Viruses
- Man-in-the-middle
- Malware
Keep a close eye on your workforce
Whether by accident or not, your workforce could be the catalyst for cybercrime hitting your business. If they are not careful, your employees could click on phishing links sent to them via email, for instance, or they could access an application on their phone that is full of trojans and viruses while connected to your office Wi-Fi. For this reason, you have to keep a close eye on your employees to ensure that they are using the web safely during their time in the office.
If you deem particular employees of yours to be particularly unreliable in this instance, you should, ever so politely, block them from accessing your business’s most valuable online data. You can do this by making use of a password manager service.
Perform audits regularly
Cybercrime doesn’t sleep, which means you have to be ready for it 24/7. To ensure that you are always in the best shape possible to fight this plight, performing regular audits on the matter is key. Whether you have a cybersecurity consultant come in to perform this audit or whether you task your in-house security team with this all-important job, you have to be kept abreast of how you are performing with regards to your cybersecurity. If you spot any areas in which you can do better in this instance, you have to get to work right away in fixing or improving the issues that you unearth.
The bigger your business grows, the bigger the target on its back will grow too. Quite simply, no matter how successful your business proves to be, it’ll never be 100% safe from cybercrime. You must, then, take the above advice and try to avoid this plight hitting and impacting your organization at all costs.
