How to Protect Your Business from Cyberattacks

With cyberattacks on businesses making headlines, it’s an important time to ensure you have the proper safeguards in place to protect your business, its data, employees and customers from cyberattacks. Whether you work with significant or very small amounts of data, have a small or large budget, or have a large or small IT team, there are safeguards you should put in place to make your business less vulnerable to cyber criminals. Here are a few areas to start.

Training for employees

Employees are often the first line of defense against cyber criminals. Because employees have access to company devices, scammers tend to use them as an avenue to access your business’s data. They do this by social engineering and phishing, which are both ways of impersonating other team members and partners and asking the employee to take a certain action like clicking on a link or providing information. This then leads to ransomware attacks and compromised data.

The best way to prevent these attacks is to provide regular education to employees about how to spot fraudulent messages and calls and how to verify a person’s identity before providing company information. These trainings can be provided by in-house IT teams or by outside consultants, and the overall purpose is simply to train employees to stop and think before sharing information before they are sure of the requester’s identity. While not every department may be targeted by criminals, everyone can play a role in keeping your company safe from any type of fraud.

Security software

Security software isn’t just for large businesses with in-house IT teams and large budgets. This software comes in many sizes and costs to suit a variety of business needs and budgets. Security software can be a helpful tool for any business to manage access, prevent data loss, protect systems from viruses and other network-based intrusions, filter email systems and web browsing, and more. Like with any new business tool, be sure to do a thorough evaluation of your options before choosing the right one for your business.

Physical security of workspaces and devices

It’s important that workspaces that contain devices and documents are locked and secured and business owners can control who has access. Additionally, even within secured locations, it’s important devices are locked when not in use.

With remote work becoming more of a long-term workplace norm, there are additional risks to consider such as protecting devices from non-employees in the household, securing home networks, preventing data from reaching personal devices and more. Check out this article for five security best practices to implement for employees that work from home.

Cyber insurance

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses expanded their digital footprint and began providing products and services online. For the first time, they began working and storing significant amounts of customer data and have now become a larger target for cyberattacks. One way to protect your business from losses resulting from cyberattacks is cyber insurance. Consider these tips from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) when evaluating cyber insurance options for your business. While following the precautions outlined in this article can go a long way in protecting your business from cyberattacks, in the case that it does happen, you’ll want to be covered from significant losses.