Cybersecurity Protects Your Data and Reputation

Did you know businesses employing less than 100 people are 350% more likely to experience a sophisticated cyber-attack? Could your business survive an attack? Keep in mind, it’s not only your finances that take a hit when you encounter a data breach. Your company also experiences losses that hurt customer loyalty like:

• Trust

• Reputation

• Credibility

• Competitive Edge

Small businesses are prime targets:

Compared to larger corporations with dedicated IT positions, many smaller businesses operate on tight budgets, which translates to spending less on cybersecurity. To prevent gaps, incorporate your entire team with a few key steps. These behaviorbased tips can serve as an extra line of defense when Mike from IT is out and Janet from HR is now your #2 tech person of the day.

Understand the importance of passwords:

Just the mention of passwords can cause heaving sighs and deep groans. Everything needs one, they all need to be different, and no–it can’t be your favorite sports team. Why does this dead horse keep getting beaten? Weak passwords have always been subject to brute force attacks; however, with the adaptation of the internet and the development of deep-learning artificial intelligence, now nearly 90% of all passwords can be cracked!

Let that fear motivate you:

Create strong, 16-character passwords utilizing a mixture of upper and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers. You can use a password manager such as 1Password or LastPass to help you securely store your different (yes-they need to be different) passwords for various applications, websites, and databases.

Enable multi-factor authentication:

Least

privilege access:

While you don’t want to spend the day playing Mother May I with your employees, you can’t give away the keys to the whole castle either. Set up your software systems with least privilege access. This means that each employee has only the permissions needed to do their job. If everyone in the company shares the same level of access to information, one compromised set of credentials would disrupt the whole system. When minimizing the effects of a data breach, the least privilege access approach has the greatest potential to contain damage.

Educate & protect against ransomware:

Ransomware is exactly as it sounds. It’s malicious software that infects, encrypts, and holds your company’s data hostage, and it’s often accompanied by a threat of information leak. Beyond forking over a ransom, this type of data breach gets costly, with an estimated average downtime of three and a half weeks. Malware is also evolving. With the rise of remote work, many companies are leaving online doors wide open for hackers. Educate employees and employ a strong security management team to avoid disruptions.

Even with a robust password in place, bad actors can still gain access if all that stands between them and your data is one piece of information. That’s why multi-factor authentication is strongly recommended. Authenticating your credentials in more than one way can look like any combination of more than one of the following pieces of information:

• Personal Information (password or pin)

• Personal Possession (identifying token or device)

• Personal Sample (biometric authentication)

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