Security

Essential Cybersecurity Guide for Small Business

Essential Cybersecurity Guide for Small Business

An excellent Cybersecurity guide for small businesses is essential for saving yourself a ton of money and resources when you are duped. People often assume that small and medium-scale businesses are spared from the wrath of cybercriminal activities. But this is far from reality. Small businesses are more vulnerable than big ones.

And the reason behind that is simple – they have a huge scarcity of the right systems and technology that protects a business from vicious cyberattacks. Thereby, this makes them easy prey to hackers. But, if you are an owner of a small-scale business, landing on this page will fetch you a world of good. Here, in this blog, we will shed light on some of the important measures you must take to protect your business. But, before that, let us brush up on some basics.

What is Cyber Security?

Simply put, cybersecurity is the defense of networks and programs that protect data from digital cyberattacks that happen in the online medium. To save the businesses from losing their data, they take to cybersecurity and add an extra layer of security on their systems to incur no loss. While on the other hand, cyber threats are the elements that cybersecurity guards against. These threats are formed to bring in some harm to the individuals they target. Let us now look at the types of cybersecurity threats.

Types of Cyber Security Threats

APT

APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threats. These are the long-term attacks that are mainly targeted to steal, disrupt or spy data. Hackers can intrude into networks and carry out their hacking stealthily and in a multitude of stages. When access is gained, the attackers might not do anything for extended periods.

DDoS

Distributed Denial of Service is the type of cybersecurity threat that has been intended to break into an operation of a network or a site by pooling it with too much information or requests. When the server sees no scope of coping up with the demand, it eventually stops working.

Phishing

Phishing is a common type of cybersecurity threat that one can see in everyday mails too. It is the act of sending out fraudulent emails that might look like legitimate ones but are not. This is crafted in a way to entice the recipients to send back sensitive or private data. These types of attacks strive to capture user credentials such as passwords and credit card information. You must particularly watch out for this one.

Ransomware

Ransomware has gained a lot of popularity in the past couple of years or so. Victims might see that their entire hard drives are encrypted with a note that asks them to pay a ransom for a decryption key. And just in case the user does not pay up – they tend to get their hands off all their data.

Also read: How to Build a Cybersecurity Strategy for Online Business

How to Cyber-Secure your Business

It is never too late to enable Firewalls:

Most of the systems today run on Microsoft Windows, which has built-in firewall utilities. These are the software-based versions that are way less effective than the hardware firewalls, but they offer some basic protection of some kind. You will be happy to know that software-based firewalls can monitor and track data traffic in and out of devices. Further, they act as a security guard for your system. Some of the options out there that you can consider include Net Deferender, Comodo Personal Firewall, and ZoneAlarm.

Start giving proper Training to your Employees:

As per the findings of a report, about a whopping 43% of the data loss incurs from the internal employees alone. This staggering number should be enough to give rigorous training to your employee. It is vital that your employees know your data’s value and evaluate the repercussions when something goes wrong or missing. Educate them on what they should do if they see a suspicious email or find a threatening alert on their system. They should have all the technical know-how to deal with the issue at the earliest.

‘S’ for Security:

The easiest way of adding an extra layer of security on your site is by enabling an SSL Certificate on your site. You will find many types of Cheap SSL certificates online that can secure your website. For checking whether a site is SSL certified or not, all you need to do is look for the padlock symbol at the top of the URL.

The whole point of installing these certificates is that they add an extra layer of security to your system by encrypting the in-transit communication that transpires between the web browser and the client-server.

This enhances the trust of your customer to stick around for more and not leave you. However, it is important to choose the right kind of certificate for your business, one that suits your budget and considers your expansion plans.

If you foresee adding multiple first-level subdomains, we suggest that you go for a wildcard SSL certificate. This allows you to secure your chosen primary domain along with unlimited first-level subdomains under it. Therefore, it makes for an excellent, scalable security choice.

Please back up your files on a timely basis:

Nothing is worse than losing all your files because you did not press on ctrl + S. Although, here is an example from Microsoft documents, the same can happen in your systems. If any cyber-attack occurs, most of your data will be erased, and it will become next to impossible to function normally. To help you with some tips, it is wiser to develop a backup plan that automatically copies your files to your storage. If you want, you can save them in a cloud-based model.

Do not use a weak Password:

Even though you are running a small-scale business where the number of employees or customers is less than 100, you must use a strong password, no matter what happens. So, what makes a password strong? To begin with, try to use alphabets, numeric, signs, and symbols and give it a tough mix. Also, make it a point to never use two same passwords for the rest of the pages of your site. And also, ensure that you change and update these passwords once every month. None of your passwords should stay on the same site for a long time. That calls for risk.

Seek help from cybersecurity professionals:

The value of cybersecurity experts is growing, especially as technology advances and cyber threats become more sophisticated and prevalent. Fortunately, the cybersecurity field is also progressing, resolving security issues and keeping businesses safe. Some of the methods adopted by cybersecurity experts include cloud penetration testing, product security reviews, continuous attack emulation, mobile app assessment, etc.

That’s a Wrap

While the Internet has given us many gifts, it is an equally dangerous place to carry out an online business. The best cybersecurity guide for a small business should be about staying alert and sound. As an owner, you need to protect not just your own devices but all the devices used by the employees.

Written by
Isla Genesis

Isla Genesis is social media manager of The Tech Trend. She did MBA in marketing and leveraging social media. Isla is also a passionate, writing a upcoming book on marketing stats, travel lover and photographer.

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