The Modern Guide in Safeguarding Your Business Against Cyber-Attacks

There’s no doubt that cybersecurity really has entered a league of its own over the last few years. Once upon a time companies and individuals might not have given it a second thought, but now it is at the forefront of a lot of minds.

Of course, the media have helped out here enormously. This is currently one of the most-talked-about topics in the news, with various companies at the center of some serious cyber-attacks which have put a lot of user data into the public domain.

Naturally, businesses around the world are starting to take action – and this is what today’s article is all about. Sure, you can have a cloud disaster recovery service in place, and this can at least ensure that any data that you do keep is going to be kept safe, and not lost in the worst-case scenario. However, to prevent the above situation even occurring, here are some issues that small businesses really need to keep an eye out for.

Phishing

Let’s start with one of the more recent developments in the cybersecurity world. In truth, phishing has been around for years, but over recent times those responsible for it really have become more advanced and ultimately started to claim more victims.

So, what is phishing? Put simply, this involves sending a rogue email to a company and asking for personal information. Quite often, this information is financially-based, and most of the emails will claim to be from online payment providers.

It means that your employees simply have to be educated around this topic. They need to know the warning signs; ranging from determining if the email address is from the correct domain, right the way to seeing if it addresses them by their personal name or not.

Traditional viruses

Next on the list are so-called “traditional viruses”. We call them traditional, as they have almost been around since the beginning of time, but the advice remains the same. In other words, if you receive any sort of file that looks suspicious, make sure you ignore it. This can be from an email or even a USB stick, but you need to ensure that you know the sender and trust that the virus isn’t going to infiltrate your computer and ultimately cause no-end of problems.

Be wary of allowing employees to bring in their own devices

Finally, this is something that smaller businesses are particularly vulnerable from. While it might feel as though you are saving money by allowing employees to bring in their own devices, you should be extremely cautious when you do so. Quite often, home devices don’t have anywhere near as much protection as a business device, and this obviously opens a lot of doors for hackers and the viruses that they create.

It means for those businesses which do allow such a practice, at least don’t allow these devices to access any internal data. A webmail client is fine, but anything beyond this can be asking for trouble.