“I don’t need to worry about cyber attacks. That only happens to big companies, or businesses that deal with customers through the internet.” If you’re using this logic to put off cybersecurity planning, it’s time to think again.
Hackers don’t care what size your business is, they just want the information.
In 2016, over 14 MILLION small businesses were hacked, bringing the US Government to address the "cyberwar against small businesses".
A study by UPS Capital has found that 60 percent of small businesses aren’t able to recover and go out of business within 6 months of a cyber attack. The financial costs of these attacks range between $84,000 to almost $150,000. Further, the findings show that 90% of small businesses have no protections for their business and customer data!
Our friends at threatsketch tell you why you should really reconsider if you’ve been taking the wait-and-see approach, or holding off on spending money to protect against something that might or might not happen (https://threatsketch.com/companys-cyber-security-time-act-now/).
3 FREE Things Small Businesses Can Do To Protect Themselves From Cyber Attacks:
- Training and Education
Your whole team should be involved when talking about cybersecurity. A cyber security protocol should be in place and understood by everyone to keep your business, employee, vendor and customer information, safe.
Making sure employees are using difficult passwords with combinations of capital and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols does make a difference. Using two-step verification systems will adds more layers to protect your information and keep you safe.
2. Stay Up-To-Date
We've heard some people argue that they avoid updating immediately after a release because they want to make sure there aren't any bugs or other issues.
Update releases from large companies usually go through rigorous testing before the it is released to the public. Also, these updates sometimes are fixes to some critical vulnerabilities, and should be installed right away.
3. Limit Access
Limiting Access is a strong measure of prevention.
Make sure your WiFi is secure. If only employees should have access to the company WiFi, a practice you can implement is to pre-program each computer to connect to company WiFi where the password isn't visible to anyone. You should also change the password on a regular basis to ensure that the access remains limited to people who should be allowed.
If you have a public/guest WiFi available, it should be configured to limit bandwidth and access. It will help prevent any unwanted users from joining your business WiFi and having access to its files.
Lastly, limiting different levels of employees for access, or areas of access, is a common practice in large companies that any business can emulate.
Final Thoughts
The free tips are just starting tips and are in no means a solution-to-all. To ensure that you are fully protected, you should look into getting a security assessment done from a trusted source.
