by Jerry Mooney
Preparing for security risks is something you need to do sooner rather than later, unless you want to experience unexpected costs and issues within your business that could cause a ton of downtime. However, downtime may be the least of your problems if you suffer from a big hack or security breach. Below, we’ll discuss how you can prepare for some of the biggest security risks. Take a look:
Protecting Data From Hackers
Protecting your data from hackers should be your top priority, whatever size your business is. We can assure you that hackers do not discriminate on business size, and that all sizes are targeted. You may find hackers come at you in the form of phishing and malware that seek to infiltrate the corporate network. To avoid this you should update patches as they become available, use security products that protect the entire IT stack, such as the the device, operating system, application, network, etc, and train your employees to have security awareness. Using things like federated identity can help you to make authentication far easier and more secure, giving everybody peace of mind and making their jobs easier.
Your Staff
Unfortunately, it’s actually people (mainly your staff) that present the biggest security risk to any sized organization. Even careful employees may find themselves victims of phishing or accidentally opening attachments with viruses if they are not trained properly. Security training should start as early on in your business as possible. A careless employee who leaves their phone in a cab, for example, could also cause huge problems for your business. Passwords, on all devices including work computers and phones, are the first line of defense against attacks. Passwords are the first line of defense, so make sure employees use passwords that have upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Make sure they take it seriously too; using the same password for each account just won’t do. There are apps and software that can allow your employees to remember a variety of different passwords while remaining protected. You may also want to make it imperative that employees change their passwords every 60 days or thereabouts.
It’s also important to note that these threats don’t always come about by accident. Internal attacks are one of the biggest threats facing your data and systems. Rogue employees, especially members of the IT team with knowledge of and access to networks, data centers and admin accounts, can cause damage that can be hard to come back from.
If a person no longer works for you, you must make sure they no longer have access to your system. You should also ensure that only employees who really need access to certain data and files have access - there’s no need for everybody to be in possession of that information. Companies should implement necessary protocols and infrastructure to track, log and record privileged account activity and create alerts so that a quick response can be put in place.