There are many business persons who want to get into digital marketing but the only reason why they had taken a step back is security. Especially, when your business falls under the SME category and trying to achieve their objective. If security is holding you back, then maybe these Cyber Security Tips can help you alleviate your fears and secure your business.
As
digital marketing is growing day by day, it has also developed the higher
possibilities of cyber attacks. According to the Forbes article, 20% of businesses which are targeted by hackers
belong to small-scale businesses. And this cost of protecting these breaches can easily reach around $2 trillion.
The owners of small enterprises think that their business is
not that big or expensive to let the hacker take an interest, hence they neglect the
flaws in their system. But the reality is different from what they think. Attackers always look for the opportunities to break into
a weak security system.
These hackers look for information related to accounts, consumers,
banking cards and personal. They manage to get this information through the
outgoing papers such as checkout forms, applications, and customer database.
Any type of openness in the security can harm the business and consumer. This
may cause irreparable harm.
Cyber Security Tips to help protect your business:
Keep only what’s required– Remove the unwanted or
extra data which is of no use, since higher the amount of data, more will be
the requirement of cyber security liability. Such a large amount of data is
known as Big data. Big data involves different security procedures in
comparison to small amounts of data. Big data contains a heap of data which can be used by the
hacker. Though small business owners know about the risk, they still don’t put extra effort into safety.
Here,
IoT applications play a negative role. As the data shared during communication
through the IoT application makes the information to travel from a different
medium. And if more traffic is thrown in between then the data can be easily
extracted by a criminal. It means data shared between
the machines has a higher probability of
manipulation by hackers.
Training employees– Employers play a major role in building an organization. Though they are also more susceptible to cyber attacks.Hence training employees is one of the most important Cyber Security Tips. In big organisations, employees are more aware of the importance of cyber security. However in SMEs, people are not experienced enough to recognise the anomalies as these organisations avoid spending for a cyber security awareness program for employees, resulting in the theft of their information. It makes the business fall into the clutches of a hacker. For example- an employee gets a spammed anonymous email to empty their inbox and in turn he/she deletes the email. The mail connected via a link may provide the important credentials to the hacker. And by the time you take action, the criminal would have emptied your bank account.
Cyber security awareness modules are available over the internet in the form of videos, thesis, articles, courses and certifications such as CISSP Certification. CISSP avails a user to get expertise on the IT forefront. Through the certification you will gain information regarding architecture security, design security, management and many more under the guidance of professional experts. CISSP helps in depth learning and gaining the skills to pass the exam. This certified course is well known among managers, architects, engineers and security officers.
Three Layer authentication – Another one of the important Cyber
Security Tips is implementing the three layer authentication. As its name suggests, it comprises
three steps or layers i.e, knowledge, possession and
inherence. The first step, knowledge consists of User Id, name, password, PIN,
etc. Possession consists of user’s controlled Sim cards, Id applications, OTP
applications, etc.
The
third, inherence consists of scanning a biological trait such as retina scan,
fingerprint scan, etc. These credentials are only applicable for the user to
whom the organization has given authorization.
These
factors are usually implemented by the big organizations and government
agencies which require high security. The layer of authentication depends on
the organization. It can be two layered or one layered only, such as the
password. The best way is to keep changing the password frequently and maintaining
a strong password. The Absent/Poor password can lead to a default guest
password which loses the value of setting a password. Holding a user’s picture
can lead to failure of Face recognition application. So, the best way is to
maintain layers of security.
Record of data – It is very important to
have the knowledge of your data. IaaS or Infrastructure
as a service and SaaS or Software as
a service are the services which give access to cloud computing to a user
over the internet such as Google docs, emails, etc. The access of these
applications should be known to the source user. Otherwise, the unknown access
can lead to a bigger risk.
Also,
small size businesses keep their records in the mail. These email copies are
the only document they have. So, in order to save the documents, they always
clone the record and store copies at different places. Do you know which part
of the business is easiest to manipulate? It is Emails. Yes, the emails are the
first and easiest
thing for a hacker to crack.
Awareness – Another one of the Cyber Security Tips, is to create awareness. Awareness is the most basic and vital part of cyber security. The next question is who are the people that fall into this category of awareness? The answer is every single person who shares their important documents over the internet. It can be via email, facebook, cloud computing, etc.
The
best way to handle these things is implementing cyber security walls around
your business. And the best practice will be by generating awareness among
employees, joint ventures, etc.
Conclusion: Generally, small size companies never take action unless they are breached. So start designing a highly secure wall so that the criminal doesn’t even think of breaking it. Conduct research to clear your concerns, such as the reason behind small size business are more prone to hacking, pillars of cyber security, how to overcome the possibility of risk and many more. You have seen numerous cases of cyber attack. So, before it gets too late, start working today by implementing these Cyber Security Tips. It may be expensive but it can prevent you from being bankrupt.
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