Are you worried that your company is at risk of becoming a victim of a cyber attack? There’s good reason to have that concern.
Cybercrime increased by 48% during 2020. This increase made 2020 the biggest year ever for cybercrime, and those numbers likely won’t decrease in the future.
With so much internet crime, you can’t afford to leave your business unprotected. Follow the six cyber security tips below to keep your company safe.
1. Install a Hardware Firewall
It isn’t enough to use the cyber security software provided by your desktop computers. You’re only going to protect your employee workstations in this case. If you want to protect your whole company network, you’ll need to connect all your devices to a hardware firewall.
Your hardware firewall will give you insight into all network traffic coming in and out of your network. These systems have data about all the known malicious threats on the internet. If your firewall detects one of those threats, it will block that traffic.
You can also use your firewall to stop your employees from visiting shady websites. Firewalls contain blacklists and whitelists to help control what your team does with their internet connections.
2. Back Up Important Files
Network security isn’t the only thing you need to consider when securing your company. The safety and integrity of your data are equally as important.
Unfortunately, hackers aren’t the only thing you have to worry about when it comes to your data.
There’s always a chance that your computer hardware fails or an employee accidentally deletes something important. Without a way to access old data, you’ll need to rebuild your files from scratch to get up and running.
If you want to save time and hassle, set up a backup system that keeps your more critical business documents safe. You can do this in a few ways.
The first backup system is a physical one. You use software to back up your information to physical devices.
These devices can be CDs, blu-rays, USB drives, and tape drives. Once you back up your data, it’s stored off-site so that office disasters don’t ruin your backups.
The next backup system is based on the cloud. Cloud backup solutions automatically download your essential documents on a schedule. If you ever lose an important file, all you need to do is log into your cloud backup system and download the missing information.
3. Set Up Two-Factor Authentication
Your account passwords are your first line of defense against data breaches. The problem is that even with strong passwords, hackers can still breach your defenses. Whether it’s because of social engineering or software exploits, there’s always a way to steal passwords.
That’s where two-factor authentication comes into play. This system creates a secondary login code when someone authenticates with a password. If you don’t enter this random code, you can’t access a user account.
Login systems have several ways to send these codes. The most common ones are text messages, email, and authenticator applications. In more complex cases, users can use hardware keys to authenticate after entering their passwords.
Doing this makes it much more difficult for hackers to compromise accounts. Even if they have a password, it’s useless to them without the secondary authentication method.
4. Use VPNs for Remote Users
If you’re like many businesses today, a lot of your employees work remotely. Technology has made it easier than ever to access your work materials from anywhere with an internet connection. Unfortunately, this also opens the door for new cyber threats.
This threat is even more pronounced if you have employees that work in public locations. They’ll need to connect to public WiFi to get what they need to work. That’s where hackers can cause problems.
Hackers set up man-in-the-middle attacks to impersonate public WiFi networks. These attacks disguise themselves as public networks, so unsuspecting victims connect to them for their internet connection.
If you connect to one of these networks, all of your internet traffic is visible to attackers. That’s where a VPN helps.
A VPN will create a secure connection to your computer network. Any network traffic that goes through this network uses your company network as a tunnel and is encrypted. Even if someone can see your employees’ traffic, they can’t gather any data.
5. Stay up to Date on Threats
Your work is never done in cyber security. Even if you took all the proper steps to secure your company network initially, there’s no guarantee that things will remain safe in the future. New threats are released all the time, so you need to continue looking into cyber security to stay on top of new threats.
These threats come in the form of new technical and social engineering threats. Hardware and software bugs open the door for new security vulnerabilities. Software developers can’t predict when hackers will discover new exploits, so it’s always a game of cat and mouse when protecting yourself from these vulnerabilities.
Social engineering threats are those that threaten your employees. Hackers use their social skills to try and pry sensitive information from pe. You need to keep them updated with these methods, so they know not to fall victim to them.
6. Get a Security Audit
Even the best security experts don’t always get things right. You have to configure the best security systems on the market if you want them to work at their best, and that leads to user error. That’s where getting a user access review audit from cyber security companies helps.
Having a security company audit your network security will help you track down any security issues your IT team missed. Once they audit your network and find your problems, they’ll send you a report with your problems and offer cyber security solutions to help close those security holes.
This is even more important if you work in a highly regulated industry. The last thing you want is to have a missed security hole lead to a data breach. It won’t only get you in trouble with your customers but also with government regulators.
Don’t Undervalue These Cyber Security Tips
All the IT infrastructure in the world doesn’t mean anything if you can’t protect it from hackers. The above cyber security tips will help get you started on the right path. Keep learning and improving your cyber security measures, so you don’t fall victim to attacks.
If you found this post helpful, head back to our blog to learn more about using technology to improve your business.