Find out how to protect your business from ransomware and data breaches.
For cybercriminals, there is no difference between you and your organisation. Successfully attacking one leads to better opportunities to infiltrate the other.
For both small businesses and large corporations, cybersecurity resilience often comes down to personal security habits. More specifically, it’s about developing secure habits and making them part of a proactive organisation-wide strategy. The vast majority of cyberattacks rely on a surprisingly small number of vulnerabilities and addressing them should be your number-one concern.
Top 10 Ways to Keep Your Data Safe Online
While developing a truly secure information security environment for yourself and your co-workers might seem like a daunting task, there are a few things you can do to significantly improve your cybersecurity defences today, at little or no cost:
- Use Strong Passwords. Eight out of every ten hacking-related data breaches involve weak, compromised, or reused passwords. Breaking an easy password is by far the easiest way to infiltrate a small business network. Good password policy requires using strong, unique passwords for every single account and changing your password regularly.
- Improve Network Security. Any time you use free, public Wi-Fi, you expose your network traffic to anyone who wants to see it. There are two ways to address this: either invest in Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology or connect using an encrypted, password-protected Wi-Fi router and avoid connecting in public places.
- Deploy a Firewall. Your firewall will mitigate threats that strong passwords and secure networks cannot. Firewalls block unauthorised access to your devices, ensuring that remote hackers and opportunistic bots cannot infiltrate your network. Even IoT devices like thermostats can be compromised and used against you – especially since these devices typically don’t have built-in security measures.
- Reduce Careless Clicking. Phishing and social engineering are among the top threats today’s users face online. It is surprisingly easy to trick someone into giving away business-critical information simply by posing as a trustworthy authority (like a supervisor or a third-party vendor). Training and phishing protection is absolutely critical to cybersecurity resilience.
- Share Less Personal Data. Publicly sharing personal data is dangerous from a phishing and social engineering perspective. The more information cybercriminals can use to impersonate you or people you trust, the harder it will be to set up an effective defence.
- Secure Your Mobile Device. Securing your office workstation is an important move, but it’s not the only security concern you should have. Risky apps and dangerous SMS links are also common attack vectors used by cybercriminals.
- Verify SSL Certificates. Whenever you’re shopping online or using any e-commerce website, you should take a moment to make sure the site is SSL certified. This is not complicated to do – just make sure the site URL starts with “https” instead of “http” and that the domain name is spelled correctly.
- Don’t Skip Updates. Skipping updates turns every software title you use into a potential threat vector. Many updates contain security patches that protect against the latest threats.
- Backup Your Data Regularly. One of the most common cyberattacks uses ransomware to encrypt important files, forcing victims to pay for a decryption key to get their data back. Organisations with cloud-powered backups can simply load their data from another source and keep working.
- Stay Informed. Cybersecurity is a constantly changing field. Hackers are always discovering new exploits, and researchers are finding new ways to thwart them. Yesterday’s best practices might land you in trouble today. Stay informed to avoid exposing yourself to the latest security risks.
Protect Your Organisation Today
Although cybersecurity concerns can be threatening, the good news is that many of the habits identified above are easy to adopt. Addressing these vulnerabilities is the easiest and most effective way to develop cybersecurity resilience quickly.
Get in touch with the team at SMB Solutions today for more information on how to keep your data safe online and how we can help protect your organisation with our range of MSP services available now.