The calendar has changed, and it’s time to plan for what’s to come with your business in 2023. Along with your marketing and staffing plans, make sure you take time to assess your cybersecurity. With so much data being stored and used online, it’s only a matter of time before there’s a threat made towards your business.
Cybercrime costs the global economy over $6.9 billion dollars every year. Cyber attacks can originate in any country, and criminals are getting more sophisticated and clever all the time. It’s something that you need to take seriously. Criminals don’t discriminate between small and large organizations. If you are on a network, then you will be a target. Here are some tips to get your company cyber-ready in 2023.
Get Tested
To start, have your business tested to see where its vulnerabilities lie. Penetration testing will examine every aspect of your network, including the portals that you use and your devices. The results will show whether you are susceptible to an attack and how you might fix it. Testing is a valuable process to get you started on the road to being properly protected.
Have Strong Password Requirements
Your passwords are the first and best line of defense against a cyber attack. However, we often think they’re stronger than they are. A typical user who is untrained or uneducated will do something like this: take a word, and then add 12 on the end of it. If they have to update the password, they make the number 13. Then they do this for every password they have.
The problem is, if someone gets the password for one portal, they can easily get into other portals by trying variations. Plus, the people who use those types of password are also likely to use something like the street they grew up on, or their pet’s name, which are easily guessed or obtained through social engineering. A strong password has a minimum of 12 characters, a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. If you don’t have these requirements in place, then you should.
Multi-Factor Authorization
Having a strong password is important. However, you can add another layer of security. You can do this through multi-factor authentication. This involves not just entering your password, but also getting a code sent to your phone or your email when you do. You then enter the code to access the portal. The code is random, and it is different every time. That way if someone wants to use your credential to access a portal, they would have to have your phone or access to your email.
Privileged Account Services
Sometimes certain people on your team need more access than others. You can add levels to any portal so that only those who are authorized can access that data. Privileged access management solutions make it easy to set up a hierarchy for access. You can control everything, from who has access, to switching priority among term members, to monitoring all privileged accounts to see if they are still valid. The key is to ensure everyone has the access to what they need, but no one has access to what they don’t.
Make Sure Your Software is Updated
We’ve all been there. You’re in the middle of work and you get an alert to update your software. Instead of doing it, you dismiss the alert because you don’t want to be interrupted. Or, you dismiss it because you have every setting working how you want to and you don’t want the update to change anything. However, those updates are more important than you think. Sometimes those updates carry vital security patches. A missed or delayed update means that you could be vulnerable. Make sure you and everyone on your team updates their software as soon as possible after getting an alert.
Cyber Security Training
When you hear the word “hack,” you probably think of a guy in a hoodie sitting in a basement and eating potato chips, typing away at some code until they unlock the portal. However, the truth is much more mundane than that. 82% of breaches are caused by human error. That means that someone on a team gave out their password, left their computer logged in, fell for social engineering, or opened a malicious email. That’s why training is so important. You can educate your team about threats and how to protect themselves and your organization.
Secure Your Remote Connections
There are more people working from home nowadays than ever before. They are working in home offices, on their couch, or even in coffee shops. The problem is, public wi-fi and home wi–fi connections tend to not be as secure as you might think. Everything that a staff member might be typing on their computer may be accessed by a criminal. To combat this, give everyone that is working remotely a VPN, and do not allow access to devices and apps unless it is activated. This will give the protection they need to access the internet safely.
Back It Up
Lastly, the best thing you can do is back up your data on a regular basis. You can back it up on a separate cloud server, or on a physical hard drive. One of the most common types of cyber attacks is ransomware. This is when hackers get access to your data, and then encrypt it so that you can’t access it. They will only release it when you pay the ransom. This can be crippling for some organizations, but if you have your data backed up, you just have to restore it and continue on.
It’s never been more important to have strong cyber security measures in place. Remember those tips so that you can get your company cyber-ready this year.
Also Read: A 2023 Enterprise Cybersecurity Hygiene Checklist
