Cyber Security Awareness: Is Your Company Information Secured?

Cyber Security Awareness Month: Is Your Company Information Secured?

It seems like every month brings the news of another massive hack of a company’s data, putting the financial and personal information of customers in the hands of hackers. Experian, the credit-monitoring service, Target, the retailer, Ashley-Madison, the affairs-themed dating site- the list goes on and on. Millions upon millions of customers have seen the companies they trusted fail to protect their data. Don’t become a headline: use these five tips to help head off a cyber-breach at your company.

Training

The first thing to do is to train the staff in avoiding suspicious emails and similar attempts to bypass a company’s security. it’s quite common for attackers to send viruses attached to emails or attempt to lure employees into entering their account information into fake online forms. Some of these lures can be very convincing. By training your staff in how to recognize them, you are cutting off a potential route that hackers use to attack your data. In fact, attackers love to use this kind of technique because it is cheap and easy- they don’t need to try to defeat a company’s security.

Use Cloud Services

If you are a small business, you might not have the time or money to develop powerful security solutions. One possible answer is to rely on cloud services. Put all sensitive data and carry out analysis on that data within an enterprise cloud. That way, you can use that company’s security instead of your own to protect the data. A company capable of offering cloud services will also have a powerful array of cybersecurity measures, making them an ideal choice for an ally.

Internet Protocols

In addition to training staff in recognizing breach attempts, it is also a good idea to create a set of internal protocols to avoid exposing data to the Internet. Any Internet-connected device can potentially be hacked, so limiting which devices face the Internet and which company resources are connected to those devices can control the extent to which hackers can access useful data. A set of BPM or business process management evaluations can show whether the company can keep some resources offline and develop policies to prevent any contagion from spreading from Internet-connected resources to internal ones. That is like quarantining anything that can connect to the Internet. Read More...