Top Ways to Protect Yourself From Cyber Attacks

No matter the size of your business you need to do what you can to protect yourself from cyberattacks. There was a big slowdown in the economy during the pandemic but the cyber criminals out there did not slow down at all. They already work remotely which means they already have a step ahead for most businesses who don’t work remotely. They are refining their tactics and improving their techniques to ensure that small and mid sized businesses are the ones that miss out. 

The remote workforce only enhances their opportunities because the work from home trend is often not as secure as working in an office. It’s actually a wonderful way to work, but you need to have a VPN on public Wi-Fi to ensure that you are as secure as possible. A cyber attack can take down a whole business as suddenly as a heart attack, but it’s good to know then, that plenty of small businesses are already taking positive steps to ensure that they can defend against attacks. So, with that in mind, here are some of the ways that you can prevent cyberattacks from happening in the first place.

• Train your team. One of the best defenses you have against a cyber attack is to make sure that everybody knows what they’re doing. Phishing for example was 57% successful in 2019 and it’s because people just don’t understand it. If you train your employees to identify what email is fake and which email is real, you have a low cost but high reward measure that your company can deploy compared to everybody else. Training should be invested in and your team should be invested in, to.
• Test for your vulnerabilities. Almost all companies should look at their current security and they should be doing that every week or every month. If you have an outsourced IT team, they can ensure that your systems are not vulnerable at all. Catch straight away if someone has tried to engage with your systems from an external source. By ensuring that you build a secure environment against an attacker, you will reduce the likelihood of that attack being successful. This is exactly what you want to do.
• Keep backing it up. Not only should you be backing up sensitive data at least once, all servers that are needed to keep your business going should be backed up multiple times a month. Data storage can be expensive, so you need to make sure that you can build a backup plan that keeps you protected while also allowing you to switch back to something that you’ve had before. In the event of an attack, you can then recover all of your data.
• Invest in good insurance. Because cyber attacks become more prevalent as more technology evolves, insurance companies have caught on to this. You can ensure that you have good cyber insurance as a must for your business. Of course, every cyber defense you invest in can’t guarantee an attack will be thwarted, but your insurance will help to cover you in the event the attack happens to be successful. It will offset the cost of the ransomware and the losses to your company due to downtime.