5 Ways To Protect Your Business From Cyber Attacks

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With the ever-growing trend of digitization, there has been a constantly growing threat of cybersecurity.

Every business, irrespective of its size, has got the threat from cybersecurity amplified, making the digital leaders move towards response strategies. The breath-taking WannaCry attack and the recent fluctuation in the cryptocurrency market have all made clear how important it is for business leaders to work on cybersecurity.

Consider the statistics as global market spends on cybersecurity were $3 trillion in 2015 while it is predicted to grow by $10.5 trillion every year until 2025.

This rapid adoption of cybersecurity has happened due to 43 percent of global attacks made on small and medium businesses. Even though 14 percent of these have proper security measures in place to resist malware, DDOS attacks, phishing, other security incidents have all raised the concern for improved security practices such as regular backups for example.

Especially with 66 percent of businesses being reported of cyberattacks in 2020 only, keeping your business protected against cyberattacks is vital for running a successful business.

Increased Cybersecurity Fears With “Work From Home”

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the entire world, troubling all the business operations. Though remote working appeared to be a solution to overcome the operational gaps, it was the perfect opportunity for cybercriminals to go for trade since most organizations went for work from home without any planning on security solutions.

To give it a number, the cyber division of the FBI received nearly 4000 complaints every day during the initial stage of the pandemic, signaling a 400 percent rise in cybercrime and 800 percent for ransomware attacks.

As all these attacks made were highly sophisticated attempts to cyber compromises, it is vital to understand the top cybersecurity threats and ways to protect your business against unexpected loss.

Top 5 Cybersecurity Trends and Threats to know in 2021

2021 can be a year full of cyber threats for businesses after all the downtime that happened in 2020. With the likeliness of increasing cloud-based threats in 2021, there are so many other cyber risks that are likely to emerge. These include:

• Critical cloud-based security threats for small to medium firms struggling with digital transformation.
• Insider threats may happen due to negligence or malicious intent of staff.
• Remote work security issues leading to data or financial risks.
• Phishing attacks are made for accessing sensitive data or introducing malware to the system.
• Malware leading to stealing, losing, or encrypting of data.
• Ransomware attacks are made to keep data hostage in exchange for a ransom amount.
• IoT devices that are under development leading to vulnerabilities.

Besides this, there are so many ways cybercriminals could attack your business, even if you have the best of security systems in place. Thus, it is essential to understand the right tactics that can work for you in keeping your business protected against cyberattacks.

Keeping Your Business Secure – Top 5 Recommendations

With the growing risk for cyber threats, every organization these days is looking for ways to protect its finances and business data through cybersecurity solutions. Here are a few ways that can help you keep your business secure:

1. Response Plan For Cybersecurity

Make sure you have the right response plan against any cyber threats that are likely to hit your digital strategy. It can be initiated by educating your remote business managers and staff on all the business threats ensuring that all the vulnerabilities could be kept at bay. Besides this, you can also measure all the potential threats to build a strong incident response plan highlighting the entire course of action that you, your staff, or stakeholders might need to face in case of an attack.

2. Business Security

Use security software that is efficient to take down any security risks. Some of the possible business security actions you can take include:

• Use of anti-spam software, anti-spyware solutions, and antivirus that can help you keep a check on all the updated data or extensions that might damage your business.
• Back up data and password security on your digital systems, preventing any chances of cracking or authentication bypass.
• Make sure you evaluate the cyber resilience strategy used by your organization to check the system’s health against any possible chance of compromise.
• You can invest in breach assessment that can help you picture your organization’s ability to overcome any cyber incidents or measure resistance against response activities.

3. Data Encryption

If you are keeping your data on the cloud or any other online space, make sure you have it encrypted to avoid any hacking attempt made to steal or destroy your information. Apart from this, you can consider investing in a proxy solution made to give you anonymity while surfing across different browsers or networks. Proxy settings make it difficult for hackers to track your activities and get into the system for ransomware or phishing attacks.

4. Check All Your Online Activities

Make sure you always have a track of activities happening on your private network while preventing any sites that are not essential for the business processes. Also, any devices that are used for extremely vulnerable data use should be secured when not used. Make sure you discourage using public Wi-Fi on such devices, and any hard drives or USB devices used at the organizations should either be restricted or scanned before use.

5. Regular Audits

Last but not least, make sure you have a proper administrative process for securing your business data. You can keep your business protected against cyber-attacks by planning routine audits of your system. Also, you should ensure that your business security system should be tested well to avoid any kind of errors or attacks. This might need you to invest in quality assurance services that can offer compliance with security standards.

Especially when you are an organization that is associated with customer data or financial statements, consider investing in some reliable software testing services to ban any tabletop exercises that might lead to breaches.

The Crux

The growth of the technology sector calls for innovation which flows well for cybercriminals. Therefore, it is extremely important for business organizations to have a dedicated security system in place to overcome any threats. Phishing, malware, DDOS attacks, SQL injections are certain common forms of cyberattacks that are likely to hit your business. However, the only thing that makes a difference is a great resilience strategy and a time investment that you make in security testing services.

So keep safe online!

Author Bio: Kanika Vatsyayan is Vice-President Strategies at BugRaptors who oversees all the quality control and assurance strategies for client engagements. She loves to share her knowledge with others through blogging. Being a voracious blogger, she published countless informative blogs to educate the audience about automation and manual testing.