5 Ways to Defend Your Business From Cyber Threats
by Sarah Harvey / October 13th, 2017
As cyber threats continue to be a major concern for business owners, not having a cybersecurity strategy in place is no longer an option. You must be prepared to defend your business from cyber threats and be proactive with your cybersecurity prevention strategies. Here are 5 easy ways to defend your business from cyber threats.
1. Know Your Risks
As auditors, we frequently talk about risk assessment and risk management strategies as the foundation of any information security and cybersecurity program. By performing a formal risk assessment, your organization can gain a clear picture of where your assets lie, and what internal and external vulnerabilities exist. Keeping an awareness of the threat landscape and the cybersecurity threats that exist can help defend your business from cyber threats.
2. Promote a Culture of Cybersecurity
The workforce is any organization’s critical line of defense, and with the threat landscape rapidly changing, it’s important to keep employees on their toes at all times. Creating a culture of cybersecurity can help encourage employees to be aware of cyber threats and help to educate the workforce on recognizing and preventing cyber threats from occurring.
3. Ensure Hardening Standards
Implementing hardening standards is an important step to defend your business from cyber threats. System and network hardening, also known as “defense in depth,” is a great approach to eliminating the potential of a cyberattack by creating multiple layers of protection. A strong perimeter firewall, anti-virus, strong passwords, IDS, and physical access controls are all examples of hardening techniques. Using these controls in combination can help to defend your business from cyber threats.
4. Encrypt Everything
Strong encryption is an easy way to defend your business from cyber threats as it helps to protect sensitive data that you don’t want to end up in the wrong hands. Encryption can allow sensitive data (from credit card numbers, health information, or any other personally identifiable information) to transfer across networks without being compromised or accessed without being authorized.
5. Update Your Software
As many organizations have learned the hard way over the last couple of years, leaving critical updates to software and operating systems unpatched could lead to serious vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited by a malicious attacker. Best practices state that patches that are released as critical should be implemented within 30 days of release.
Don’t wait until you’re under attack from a cyber threat before you start having the conversation of cybersecurity at your organization. Take steps now to defend your business from cyber threats. For more information or help with ramping up your cyber security program, contact us today.
