How do you protect your business from cyber-attacks?
Perform risk assessment and degree of exposure of the company to cyberattacks
To perform an assessment that allows you to understand what are the risks and the degree of exposure inherent to a particular company or business, it is necessary to follow some steps that should be part of an ongoing process, which should be revised to keep it always up to date.
It is important to identify the company's critical assets, that is, the systems, databases, devices, networks, and applications that present the greatest risk of attack, and therefore their protection must be ensured first. Next, it is essential to identify the most common cyber attacks - ransomware, malware, phishing, among others - and detect whether there are vulnerabilities in the systems, devices and applications in use, such as outdated software that represent an opening for an attack to occur.
Companies should assess what impact each threat could have on their 'critical assets' and consider potential financial losses, data loss or interruption of operations, and assess the likelihood of each threat occurring taking into consideration metrics and statistics on historical data, trends and other relevant data.
Finally, developing an action plan to mitigate identified risks is a good way to prevent cyber attacks, and actions with the highest potential effectiveness should be prioritized.
Employee training on information security
Since cybersecurity is a shared responsibility, it is important that all employees have the knowledge of the risks involved in the event of a cyberattack, as well as the ability to understand and follow recommended security measures.
It is imperative that company employees receive adequate training so that there is an understanding of the importance of keeping devices secure (laptops, tablets and smartphones), risks associated with using personal devices on corporate networks, use of strong or multi-factor authentication passwords and recognition of security threats such as phishing or malware.
Maintenance and update of software, systems and services
It is important that companies keep all software, operating systems, applications, security programs up to date at all times, ensuring that they are maintained.
When it comes to safeguarding a company's data and information, regular backup of it should be performed - by adopting a good cloud storage service, provided by a reliable and secure provider - in order to minimize the impact of a potential cyber attack.
Information and data should be stored in a centralized system or a small number of systems, with access controlled and monitored, through security measures such as validation processes - two-factor authentication or OTP (one time password) sent by SMS or email, in order to reduce exposure to potential dangers and attacks.
The use of original programs instead of pirated ones should prevail in order to protect the business against hacking and avoid compromising internal data that could easily result in a leak.
Cybersecurity is constantly evolving due to new threats that emerge more and more over time, requiring a proactive and continuous approach by companies to protect people, systems, programs, data and confidential information so that businesses operate without interruption, do not lose important data, do not suffer financial loss and damage to brand reputation.