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In today’s day and age, companies must have a string online presence in order to succeed in a very competitive market. However, the online world is full of dangers that lurk behind almost every corner.
Cyber criminals are constantly scanning for potential targets because company data and consumer sensitive information they store is very much valuable to hackers who can later sell that information to interested third-parties.
And since most companies focus all of their resources on developing products or services, marketing endeavors and sales, there’s not much left to invest in proper cybersecurity measures. That said, even a single data breach can potentially ruin a business completely.
Therefore, by ignoring security, many companies are exposing themselves and painting themselves as a target for cyber criminals. As a matter of fact, 60% of small companies go out of business within six months of a data breach, as they’re unable to properly recover from the attack. With that in mind, let’s have a look at a few ways you can protect your company from cyber attacks.
Attack simulations
One of the most effective ways to test your company’s network, as well as test your products for security vulnerabilities is continuous pentesting or penetration testing, if you will, which basically simulates and attack on your network, product or anything else. If you want to protect your company from cyber attacks and other exploits, you need to know what your weaknesses are.
Penetration tests can identify security weaknesses in your software code, security measure and company network, to name a few, and help you fix those issues before someone else with malicious intent decides to take advantage of your vulnerability. And since security threats constantly evolve and hackers get craftier, continuous testing is an absolute must.
This way you can constantly simulate attack every time there is new data or information about cyber attacks and determine if your company’s security measures can withstand those attack or not. After all, the moment you left your guard down is the moment when things can go completely astray and you’ll have a data breach to worry about.
Educate employees
The most common weakness in any company’s network is employees themselves. This is not because your workers want to sabotage you on purpose, it’s because they are blissfully unaware of potential dangers that may target them directly.
Although cyber attacks that have become increasingly frequent, most of them are successful because an employee made a mistake. But you can’t blame employs for falling for a phishing scam. After all, phishing scams have become much more advanced and socially engineered to fool even the security experts themselves.
Therefore, phishing scams are no longer shady mails with shady links. In fact, hackers can study potential targets for weeks or months, engineering the right means to lure a victim into a trap in the process.
That’s why it’s every company’s responsibility to educate employees about these threats and train them how to handle the situation accordingly. That is the only way you can ensure that you employees don’t fall for any type of scam, socially engineered or otherwise.
Implement security software
Investing in proper security measures is of the utmost importance for companies that want to ward off any potential data breaches. Security software, such as anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-ransomware and so on can keep the intruders at bay for the most part. How effective security software is depends on which one you use and whether or not it has comprehensive security features that are proved to be effective against cyber attacks.
However, software alone cannot fully protect your company from cyber criminals. Still, it’s just one layer of security that does what it’s supposed to so you need to have something, which is most certainly better than having no protection at all. Proper security software can monitor your network and detect potential breach attempts if they’re unable to directly stop them.
This way you can act immediately to mitigate and minimize the damage before things get out of hand. Even though most companies may not have the capital to invest in state-of-the-art security measures, there are more affordable solutions that can be just as effective.
Always have a recovery plan
The fact of the matter is that data breaches can happen eventually no matter how much you try to prevent them. Sooner or later, a hacker will manage to bypass your defenses and penetrate your network. However, how fast you respond and how quickly you can recover can mean the difference between a data breach ruining your company and causing a mild inconvenience.
This is why every company needs to have a proper recovery plan in place. That plan should include measures for early detection of data breach, policies that will prevent further damage, regular backups of data and information, methods for recovering the system prior to the attack and so on. In other words, when a data breach happens, it’s all about damage control.
The first step is always to prevent the attacker from digging deeper or doing more damage than they already did. After that, everything comes down to restoring the system and ensuring that the attacker can no longer continue with the attack. Only then can you focus on determining what went wrong and how to fix it.
Closing Words
Cyber attacks are more common that business owners might think. Hackers are constantly on a lookout for potential target they can exploit and steal data from. Therefore, one cannot simply neglect the importance of cybersecurity measures or disregard the damages a data breach can cause to company’s profits and reputation. That’s why every company needs to have an allocated budget for security.
Otherwise, it won’t matter how much you’ve invested in your products or services, as well as how much you’ve invested in growth and development of your company. When a data breach occurs, and there are high chances that it will occur eventually, your company can easily go out of business if you don’t have a way to minimize the damages or prevent data breaches from ever happening, in the first place.
