How to protect your business from cyber-attacks?

By Ravindra Savaram, Vmonlinetraining and Tekslate

Introduction

Cyber threats have become a scary reality with a high percentage particularly targeting individuals and businesses. No matter what the company’s government stature or the size of the business or who the individual victim, the threat of cybercriminals stealing critical information is real. The practice of extortion resulting from a cyber attack has become more common for all business sizes and types.

Today, one of the major places to do business is the Internet and it brings a wealth of benefits and opportunities. In fact, the capability to operate a website, transact and work remotely, safely store data and email is crucial to the ability to grow, everyday operation, and success. However, along with this comes a huge element of risk.

For the purpose of extortion, cyber-attackers can threaten to institute a DoS(Denial-of-Service) attack, publish personally identifiable information or personal information on employees or customers, take over social media accounts, infect an organization with a virus, or erase data or shut down computer systems. As such, it is important that businesses must do whatever they can to protect themselves against cyber attacks.

How Businesses Can Protect Themselves From Cyber Threats?

Let’s have a look at ways in which businesses can protect themselves from cyber threats.

Security Policy

It is crucial that your company defines security protocols for each of your business aspects to ensure your organization is protected from cyber threats. These protocols must be intrinsic within your business strategy. Due to a large amount of information being stored digitally, it is crucial that your company’s policy cover addresses newer concerns like the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and social media security along with standard practices like data backup and security audits. In addition to this, ensure you have an incident response plan in place as part of your security policy so that your company will be prepared to respond immediately if something does happen.

Ensure Everything is Up-To-Date

Always make sure your anti-virus software and various other security applications are updated regularly. By doing this, you can keep your company safe from new threats and ensure your infrastructure is secure. You can also use full-disk encryption tools to secure your data and these tools come as standard with almost all the operating systems. These tools will encrypt every file on your device within a minute without slowing it down.

Hire a Cybersecurity Expert

Appointing a cybersecurity expert for monitoring and safeguarding information is an excellent option that many businesses are turning to, especially because the cloud-based services are on the rise. By using a third-party company that specializes in the field of cybersecurity, you can rest assured that they are updated frequently with the latest threats and your protection grows and scales as required. These companies will know what to look for and will intimate you if they find anything suspicious. This way, you can focus more on your employees and business.

Backing Up Your Data

Protection of your business enhances if you back up your information regularly. You have to backup all your data, files, and various other basic resources as they are the backbones of your business. This is quite helpful if any unknown invasion takes place.

A cyber threat such as malware can erase all your information or disable your structure/framework. So, it is great that you have a reinforcement of all the data,  especially basic information. Saving backups in the cloud or to an outside hard drive is an effortless method to ensure that your data is stored securely.

Train Your Staff

Educate your employees on how their online behavior should be and what risks they are prone to. Train them about the warning signs of cyberattack and best practices in cybersecurity, as well as the procedures to follow if an attack occurs. Enforce strict password policies for all your staff and business accounts. Draw the line on what internet practices are not allowed on devices and within the office. Make sure your employees are aware of how to act when a sudden attack happens.

Wrap-Up

Cyber attacks are quite common these days and the prime targets for them are the businesses.  By implementing the above-mentioned practices, you can save your business from a lot of cyber attacks down the line. Make sure your employees obtain training in cybersecurity to better counter the cyber attacks.

About the Author

Savaram Ravindra was born and raised in Hyderabad, popularly known as the ‘City of Pearls’. He is presently working as a Content Contributor at Tekslate.com and vmonlinetraining.com. His previous professional experience includes Programmer Analyst at Cognizant Technology Solutions. He holds a Masters degree in Nanotechnology from VIT University.  He can be contacted at savaramravindra4@gmail.com. Connect with him also on LinkedIn and Twitter.