Cybersecurity essentials for small and large businesses

Although it’s absolutely essential that your marketing and sales strategy are top-notch when starting out in a small business, there’s no excuse for disregarding something as essential as cybersecurity, especially in this day and age.

According to research, more than half of small businesses experience a cyber-attack at least once during their operations, and around 60% of them close down simply due to being unable to continue providing their services or being robbed blindly. Which means cybersecurity should be at the front of your mind.

But small business is not the only sector that is vulnerable to these attacks. In fact, it could be said that large businesses are a better target for hackers considering the volume of their operations and how hard it becomes to control it all.

The sectors most affected by these attacks have something to do with digital services, be it entertainment, sale of products or pretty much anything you can imagine.

It’s unfortunate that real talk about cybersecurity in a specific industry starts only after a disaster occurs. Where a large brand is attacked and taken down by hackers. As informed by online gambling news source, this was the case in the industry of online gaming, where the servers were all but shut down in one case, and the games’ algorithms were tampered within the other.

As a result, two large brands went completely bankrupt from either failing to generate income or losing it all to a single malware. And all of this because the simplest of precautions were not made in advance.

In this article, we’d like to provide you with a couple, very simple measures you can take to prevent any of the above from happening, regardless of what type of business model you work with. They’re virtually free, so it’s not necessarily an investment.

How hackers usually get access to servers

Believe it or not, most of the security breaches on a company’s server happens through the internet surfing of their employees. Imagine the sheer amount of information being stored on just a single corporate computer. Now imagine just how much additional information a hacker can access in your network by just getting a hold of one device.

Through the surfing of the internet and the display of private and sensitive information, employees, as well as the corporate branch, tend to share too much for their own good, and all of this for lacking good preventative measures.

Let’s tackle this issue primarily, as it’s the most common reason for hacks in the business world.

Invest in a good Anti-Virus system

Antivirus systems are the single most important and affordable investment you can make for the sake of your business’ cybersecurity. Developers from all over the world dedicate years to creating software that is smart enough to detect threats or malware trying to tap into sections of your system that are off-limits.

Things that collect personal information and sometimes even passwords get through to the system due to visits on unauthorized websites. It doesn’t even need to be an unauthorized website, even large platforms such as Facebook or Reddit are bombarded with cyber attacks almost every minute and sometimes one may get through. Once that happens, anyone online at that time has a serious threat of catching the same malware and transporting it to the local system.

Without an Antivirus the malware would go through without a single issue.

Therefore, it’s absolutely essential that you register with an Antivirus system that not only protects the server side of the company, but also the online part of your employees’ browsing tendencies.

Most Antivirus systems are designed to catch a threat before a person connects to a specific server, thus notifying your employees about the potential issues of accessing certain websites.

But just having the antivirus is not enough, you have to train your staff about the threats as well.

Train the staff

Make sure that your staff is aware of the threats and perceives every warning their Antivirus system gives them seriously.

The moment that software tells them that it’s dangerous to continue on a specific platform, is the moment the employee should be aware to close the tab and wait for a few hours for the issue to be corrected if it’s a reputable website.

Regular scans and improvement approvals should also be taught to the employees considering how even the most effective Antivirus systems may not be up to date with the new tactics that hackers develop almost every single day.

Keep passwords confidential

If a password of a specific platform could potentially lead to a lot of company information being compromised, then it’s probably best to hand it out to the staff in handwritten form.

Sending it out through a software that is connected to the Local Area Network (LAN) could leave it vulnerable to malware that might squeeze through your already existing firewalls.

It’s best to have the passwords created through random generators that include things such as symbols, upper and lower case letters and numbers in order to decrease the chance of “brute force access”, which is a method to simply calculate a specific user’s password.

Write all the passwords down and keep them at the staff’s hand without too much exposure to the server.

Is that it?

All of the methods we’ve displayed here are just the very basics of cybersecurity for any company. The real complex precautions which are usually undertaken by large corporations are only available through hiring cybersecurity consultants and people who will constantly monitor the system’s integrity.

If we were to start explaining how that works, it would still most likely be very complex. Should these basics not be enough, simply hire a professional who will take care of all the complicated measures for you.