7 Tips to Protect Your Business from Cybercrime
7 Tips to Protect Your Business from Cybercrime
Cybercrime is on the rise and a very real threat for business owners.
To make matters worse, hackers don’t have rules, regulations, and compliance concerns, which means that small business owners must take an offensive position to security. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t seem to focus on network and system security until after they’ve been compromised, been affected, or lost data.
Security starts at the front door and needs to be well designed through technology. What can you do to protect your business from some of the threats out there today?
#1 Be deliberate about passwords and access. Make sure your staff changes passwords on a regular basis and make it mandatory to create complex passwords.
#2 Employ a layered security approach between your network and the internet. This could include: a Unified Threat Management based firewalls, URL filtering, third party spam filtering, encrypted email, and intrusion protection system and a web application filter
#3 Discuss banking security services including account controls with your commercial banker.
#4 Insist on routine vulnerability testing of your network and remediation as necessary. Make sure your company is using an advance firewall. Be sure to keep your subscriptions and patching up-to date.
#5 Make sure you educate users on what software they can use as well and what they should avoid clicking on. Implement advance filters and anti-spam services to prevent your users form getting malware and infected emails.
#6 Keep your computer operating systems and mission-critical applications running on the most current and supported versions. Update your SSL certificates and Application Programming Interface keys. Replace any machines that are running Windows XP because Microsoft stopped providing security patches for this operating system.
#7 Ensure you have a reliable data backup and recovery system so that if you must restore, you can do so quickly and efficiently.
Conclusion: The key to protecting your business is: awareness, planning, protection and ongoing auditing.
This IT Security Tip is brought to you by BlackBox Connections.
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