Steps to Take for Improving the Cyber Security of Your Small Business

October 9th 2012 at 3:52pm Published by firstdownadmin

The world of business is growing at a rapid pace and we are seeing many new small businesses spring up. The rapid increase in the number of small businesses has meant that now cyber hackers are targeting them for some easy money. More than 43 percent of all data breaches that were studied as part of a new data report by Verizon were targeting small businesses with poor security infrastructure.

These cyber security attacks cannot just damage the integrity and reputation of your business, but they can also put a bad name on your company’s organization.

Here we discuss some of the steps you can take to reduce the risk of a cyber security attack on your organization:

Train Employees to Handle Phishing Attacks

Phishing is one of the most common hacking techniques used by scammers, through which they can infiltrate any system by duping users into downloading malware through a harmless link on their email. The phishing click through cost have dropped significantly from the past, but you still need to teach your employees just how they should be careful with their internet usages online, and how they should look to avert an online phishing attack from happening. A phishing attack can seriously damage the integrity of your business and is not something that you would want to go through.

Most employees can be hit by a phishing attack on their mobile devices, and with remote ERP platforms, the attack can make its way into the employee platform for the organization.

Knowing this, it is necessary that you have only authorized access to your platforms and teach users how to practice online security on mobile devices.

Backup Critical Data

You would probably want to create a backup for all the critical data that your organization currently has. By critical data we mean data that is currently critical to the core processes of your organization.

Once you have a backup of such data, you won’t have to worry about losing important data during an attack. Backing up data requires significant reserves, and you can try getting a small business funding to fund the resource.

Focus on the Basics

Cyber security attacks usually happen when organizations forget to focus on the basics around them. You need to know the importance of focusing on all the basics of safeguarding your work stations.

The basics include:

• Installing an antivirus that will act as an anti spyware within your computer system
• Keeping all of the security software updated
• Regularly patching your software
• Encrypting all of the data that is moving through your network

These measures are quite basic, but when implemented they can give you a fair amount of security as a small business.