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Often times, we often hear about data breaches on the news. These may involve huge corporations and government offices being hacked. However, the truth is that all businesses are vulnerable to attacks. Whether you manage a big or a small company, you can still be a victim of hacking and data breach.

Unfortunately, small businesses are prone to being hacked because these companies are not well protected. It may be because of the lack of resources or lack of employees to handle the cybersecurity division.

Hackers can get into big companies without a hitch. What is gonna to stop them from going for the small fishes in the sea? Small companies are easy money for these hackers because they cannot afford a tight level of online protection. With that being said, I will list some cybersecurity tips that every small business can apply.

1. Create Better Passwords

The first thing to do create strong password to protect your devices and your network. This step should be mandatory, and do not even try to implement “temporary” weak passwords.  If you have a secure network, you should follow strict standards.

Strong passwords are needed, and the one should change/update on a regular basis. Apply certain policies in order to avoid any accidental sharing of passwords even to co-workers.

2. Set Certain Restrictions

Next, you should not only depend on passwords. A secure defense contains layers upon layers of security. This is to avoid any sensitive data safe from going out. This means you should limit the access of certain information. In addition, you should put extra layer of password, encryption, and more.

3. Monitor the Devices Used

Being a newbie, your business cannot afford getting laptops and personal computers at the time being. Naturally, your starting group of employees will have to use personal devices when working.

To make sure that company data won’t leak, it will help if you install a monitoring software on their devices. Implement rules to make sure the devices are secured such as installing security updates, and changing passwords from time to time.

These are security measures in order to protect your business. Hence, you have to clearly explain to your employees that this is not invasion of privacy. You just being careful especially if employees may put the business at risk while using their own devices.

4. Train Your Employees About Cybersecurity

Even if you apply the best cybersecurity solution there, your employees can unknowingly trigger a data breach. So, train your employees regarding the repercussions of their actions. Hence, you have to make sure that all your employees learn on how to properly use company resources with compromising security. Lastly, they should know that security should be the top priority.

Level up your cybersecurity!

Cyber attacks are NO joke, and you should not take it lightly. These cyber criminals can bring down businesses if they want to. Luckily, you can protect your business with the help of IT service providers such as Omnipotech. It’s about time to take cybersecurity very seriously!

 

More on 5 Cybersecurity Tips for Small Businesses (Part 2)

By 2021, Cybersecurity Ventures estimated that the cost of cybercrime damages would be $6 trillion, an increase from $3 trillion in 2015’s forecast.

Huge companies aren’t the only ones at stake here. In Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report, they revealed that 43% of the cyber threats involved small businesses. The worst part? Cyberattacks continue to flourish, and according to the insurance provider Hiscox, businesses would roughly need $200,000 to combat it. In this blog post, we will discuss the top 4 trends impacting cybersecurity in 2020.

Mobile Malware

  • According to ZDnet.com, mobile malware was the most common threat last year. This is not a surprise, knowing that mobile users are continuing to rise. In fact, Statista predicts that there will be around 3.5 billion smartphone users worldwide by 2020. With these numbers expected to continually increase, malware attack would be a growing problem for many.
  • One of the popular types would be banking malware. Hackers everywhere are developing apps that would pretend as the real deal when, in fact, these aren’t legitimate apps.
  • In 2015, there were already over 1.6 million malicious installations designed to creep in mobile devices and collecting personal data such as bank information, password, and other login details.
  • Kaspersky Lab found a wide array of 30,000 banking-based malware, which were targeting 312,235 users. Mobile malware grew in numbers and, likewise, grew in landscape. You see, in 2018, banking trojan malwares were only part of the 1.85% of all the mobile attacks. However, as earlier as the first quarter of 2019, banking malware was already the culprit of 3.24% mobile threats.
  • Not only that, Kaspersky Lab also found out that Asacub, a specific malware that affects 58.4% of all banking attacks, was trying to infiltrate the mobile devices of 8,200 users each day. That’s just in 2019 alone!

Security in Cloud Computing

  • Everyone is moving to cloud computing. Many businesses opted to migrate to an online store instead of maintaining a brick and mortar store. Perhaps, they would want to tap a different demographic, or they simply want to start anew. However, businesses on the cloud are susceptible to data breaches.
  • Without understanding the solutions of these cloud computing tools, businesses could be vulnerable to threats. Big-time players in the business world – the popular streaming service Netflix, and the American multinational automaker Ford Motor Company – were not safe from such large-scale threats. A cloud backup provider hired by these companies exposed their data storage repository out in the open.

The Use of Automated Tools

  • As technologies continue to evolve, it’s not only the businesses that adapt. Attackers cope with it too! Cybercriminals are also keeping up with the changing times through the use of automated tools. With such tools, it’s easy to evade security measures and manage to steal.
  • In 2019, the Sophos MTR Team has uncovered that the cybercriminals have been automating their attacks in order to stealthily gain initial access. Once they have officially compromised the environment, they will shift to using traditional methods in order to identify crucial information such as the data vault, the backup servers, and other relevant files.
  • They continue to survey the environment until such a time that the attackers, eventually, mimic the style and behavior of the legitimate administrator. Businesses would not even notice such suspicious activity because it seems part of the normal and everyday routine.

 

You roll into work on a Monday morning and learn your network has been infected with ransomware. The attackers have encrypted 100 percent of your data and demand a ransom paid in Bitcoin. You have less than 24 hours to make payment. What do you do? While this scenario may be hypothetical, the threat is all too real. You could just pay the ransom, but if you’ve never bought Bitcoin before, you will be surprised to know there is a three-day holding period once you transfer the U.S. dollars to Coinbase, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange. If the attacker allows you to extend the period, you will find that a the ransom, but if you’ve never bought Bitcoin before, you will be surprised to know there is a three-day holding period once you transfer the U.S. dollars to Coinbase, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange. If the attacker allows you to extend the period, you will find that a transfer of Bitcoin can take another three days. Can your business survive without access to your accounting system, payroll, accounts receivable, accounts payable, project files, scheduling, operations database, sales information and possibly email for an entire week? Do you have another plan in the event that you pay the ransom and they don’t give you the entire encryption key? (It occurs frequently.) You may be saying to yourself, “It won’t happen to us,” but many people have damaged their businesses and their firms’ reputation with this erroneous belief. Sure, an attack on your network may not be deadly, but you should consider these threats “black swan” events that can cause existential events.

So, how do you protect yourself? The reality is your network, your email and every digital device you have can be attacked at any time. Perhaps we get comfortable believing our company is too small or no one would want our data, but the reality is the malware and ransomware industry generates billions of dollars annually worldwide, and the smaller you are, the less sophisticated your security and disaster recovery will be. Many people imagine some nerdy hacker sitting in a dark room surrounded by monitors with empty bags of potato chips and half-consumed bottles of soda as the attacker manually tries to penetrate your network, guess your password or exploit a known vulnerability that your systems have not been proactively updated to eliminate.

Unfortunately, these attacks are carried out by global criminal organizations that are as well funded as drug cartels. They use ever-changing methods and rely upon your comfort, procrastination and ignorance regarding the sophistication of the attacks so you don’t take proactive action.

Here are the steps you should take to protect yourself: Your organization must have backups, business continuity and disaster recovery. These three terms are sometimes used synonymously, but they are very different. A backup is simply a copy of the data, and you may have more than one copy going back hours or even years, but you can’t operate from data alone. You must have the underlying operating system, databases and applications. Business continuity is a network design that assumes one or more failures will inevitably occur. Business continuity is a continuously updated and tested process with active systems that allow your business to restore to the last good backup to keep your business running. A business continuity system doesn’t need to have 100 percent of the performance of the primary system, but it will need to have 100 percent of the data, applications and security, and provide ongoing backups to keep your firm operating because you will be adding new data to it.

Finally, you need an offsite disaster recovery system that is physically and geographically separate from your primary systems. Understand the cloud is wherever your data exists, and you should have a disaster recovery copy of your data that is not in your primary cloud. The reality is 100-percent network security can only exist if users have no internal or external access to the data or the systems, but computers are worthless without access to the data. Have a plan and test it just like you prepare for safety training at your place of business or within a plant.

Next issue, I will review a layered security approach to thwart various types of attacks.

For more information, visit www.omnipotech.com or call (281) 768-4308.