Hacking a business today is easier than it has ever been. With nearly every company in America now intimately intertwined with technology, you might think cybersecurity would be a priority. But the truth is, our protective measures have grown lax as organizations fall behind the times in their trust of flimsy barriers, trusting in blind faith that they won't be targeted.
Right alongside the rise of software designed to make our life and work easier than ever, the tools cybercriminals use has advanced as well, enabling hackers to penetrate networks of highly confidential data with minimal effort. What used to take thousands of lines of code now takes a couple of clicks and a few seconds to execute.
According to a study carried out by London-based consultancy Willis Towers Watson, it's not some fancy tool that allows criminals to circumvent your defenses – it's you and your employees letting them in. The study found that human-made mistakes or behaviors cause close to 90% of data breaches and that employee ignorance is one of the leading contributors.
No matter how impenetrable you may imagine your security measures are, they'll be rendered useless if a hapless member of your team clicks the wrong link and opens the floodgates. When it comes to your biggest vulnerability, it isn't your antivirus – it's your poorly trained employees.
Here are four ways to utilize cybersecurity to prevent them from slipping up and opening your business up to attack.
USE STRONGER PASSWORDS
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it's probably anything but that to many members of your team.
According to a landmark research paper researched and published at Virginia Tech: "The Next Domino to Fall: Empirical Analysis of User Passwords across Online Services," 52% of users either use duplicate or very similar or easily hackable passwords in their online activity. Of the 29 million users and 61 million compromised passwords studied, 70% of users continued to reuse passwords compromised within the last year and 40% for those compromised over the past three years!
So, is your business at risk? Well, according to the 2018 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 81 percent of hacking-related breaches used either stolen or weak passwords. And can you guess where the hackers probably obtained those stolen or weak credentials? You're spot on if you guessed the Dark Web!
As a business owner, these numbers shouldn't just make you chuckle – they should make you mad! It may be that the entirety of your company's data, everything you've worked so hard to build over years of blood, sweat, and tears, could be guarded behind passwords as simple as "Password1, "123456," or "GoPatriots."
Make sure you train your employees on safe password practices. That means mandatory password changes to crucial business accounts every few months, each of them containing letters, numbers, and special symbols, preferably without any real words at all. It's a small change, but it can drastically increase your odds against data breaches.
MAKE CYBERSECURITY PART OF YOUR COMPANY POLICY
If your business is going to survive a digital onslaught, safe online practices for your employees need to be more than a recommendation. They need to be mandatory company policies. Every new and existing employee needs to know what's expected of them and the consequences if they deviate from guidelines. For example, when an update comes through for a critical piece of software, it needs to be installed immediately. Have a set procedure for them to follow if they encounter a suspicious e-mail or potentially malicious link. Simultaneously, make sure you provide an environment in which your employees feel comfortable reporting concerns about data privacy and information security. When set in stone, these and other practices ensure that employees remain personally invested in protecting your company.
CONDUCT A SECURITY AUDIT
The best way to flush out any employee vulnerabilities, though, will always be to do a thorough security audit of all your systems. This not only means investigating the hardware and software you're using daily but most importantly, you need also to analyze the habits of your personnel and whether they're complying with your high standards of cybersecurity.
TRAIN YOUR PEOPLE TO WIN
As they say, forewarned is forearmed. This is never truer than when defending your business from data breaches. With comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training, outlining everything from the biggest digital threats to post-breach best practices, you can turn your most significant security liability into your greatest defense. If employees know the ins and outs of hackers' tricks, it becomes exponentially more difficult for hackers to trick them and find a way into your network.
With all four of these steps, it can be challenging to determine how to implement these policies within your organization – much less what should be included – but luckily, we can help. Contact us to find out how we can help you put a robust data security and employee training program in place to patch any holes in your barriers before they become an issue.
The 7 Most Critical Business IT Security Protections
Free Report outlines the 7 Most Critical IT Security Protections Every Orlando Business Must Have In Place To Protect Against Cybercrimes, Data Breaches & Hacker Attacks
Cybercrime is at an all-time high, and hackers are setting their sights on small and medium businesses who are “low hanging fruit.” Don’t be their next victim! This report will get you started in protecting everything you’ve worked so hard to build
Concerned about the security status of your business IT network? We can help… Call us to schedule A FREE Consultation. Aurora InfoTech is a premier managed services provider specializing in both network security and information technology. Give us a call today at (407) 995-6766 to discuss your network security concerns and learn more about how we can help you secure your business IT network.
Want more Tech Tips & Security Strategies? Sign-up for our Free Cyber Security Tip of the Week email to always stay one step ahead of hackers and cyber-attacks.
Roy Richardson
Managing Partner & Co-Founder
Roy Richardson is a co-founder, Managing Partner, and CTO of Aurora InfoTech LLC, a leading Cybersecurity & IT consulting firm in Orlando, Florida. He is also a co-author of the Amazon Bestselling book, "Hack Proof Your Business", a Cybersecurity guide for business owners & executive leadership.
Roy has 20+ years of executive management & engineering experience in the Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Telecommunication industries. The vast experience he gained over the course of his career has given him a unique perspective that allows him to relate to a broad spectrum of business & technology challenges.
