Gone are the days where protecting your business from criminals meant installing a new CCTV and alarm system. While these are still important, in the modern world, you’re far more likely to be targeted by cybercriminals, who use increasingly sneaky tactics to steal money and data from your company. Cybersecurity can be a bit of a minefield, but here are a few things you can do to protect yourself.
Use a Separate Network For Payments
One worthwhile step to take is to separate various elements of your business; this is known as micro-segmentation and can help prevent cybercrime. An example of this can be your payment terminal; if you keep this on a separate network from your general store, then you can massively reduce the likelihood of a successful online attack taking place.
Frequently, cybercriminals can get into your system through things like infected emails to your employees, stealing the access data for your network, and being able to get right into your payment terminal. Keeping this separate, and having just one or two senior staff members with access means the success of an attack is significantly reduced.
Having things segmented like this means that criminals have to work a lot harder to get in, and there’s more chance that they will give up. Sometimes that’s all it takes, to put enough hurdles in front of them that they don’t feel that attacking your business is worth their time.
Utilise The Cloud
Using cloud-based backup systems is an effective way to keep your information safe. Cloud systems are encrypted for safety, which means that instead of being stored on a hard drive that you own your data is stored online.
This is helpful as if your physical computers are stolen, there’s no sensitive information stored on them. Viruses attacking your computer will also come up blank since the information isn’t stored here. Cloud backup and storage has a variety of uses; you can use it for everything from saving files to email archive, the best thing to do is think about what sort of systems are best suited to the company you run. Shop around different cloud-based providers and see what they’re able to offer you and at what price.
Use Strong Passwords
This might seem simple, but it’s easy to overlook, and many companies do-providing criminals with an easy way in. Each and every one of your business accounts should be secured with long, complex passwords. Thieves who are looking to target companies remotely often gain access due to passwords that are easily guessed, this is because there’s many common passwords that people use.
Password guessing software can crack simple choices in seconds, whereas if you add upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation, avoiding sequences and common words, there’s very little chance of anyone ever gaining access with brute force attempts. Lots of smaller businesses have a false sense of security when it comes to cyber crime, they assume that it’s major companies that criminals want access too. Using stronger passwords is a quick and easy way to reduce cyber security vulnerabilities.
But this isn’t the case, while there’s more to steal with a big corporation, systems they have in place such as DFARS compliance mean it’s far more difficult for them to steal what they want. Smaller businesses are easier to get into, so don’t assume you wont be a target.
Get Insured
Even if you do everything ‘right’ when it comes to keeping your business safe, something might still go wrong and your physical or online business could be compromised. It’s not something that any of us want to think about, but for this reason, you need to get your business insured to give you peace of mind. If something is stolen online then, having insurance means it will be replaced and won’t leave you out of pocket.