What Small Business Owners Need to Know About Cybersecurity

When checking the news, you’ll see almost daily that many large corporations and small companies fall victim to data breaches. Many of these companies, especially large companies, will suffer significant cyber attacks these are often aimed towards small businesses. So why exactly is that the case? This is due to many small businesses not being properly trained or being completely unaware of how important cybersecurity is. This is also because small businesses will often lack the extensive resources and team that can help them stay protected against a cyber-attack.

While small businesses will often not have the same level of cyber protection as a large company will, there are still multiple ways to protect yourself. 

What sort of attacks are there?

There are multiple types of attacks that happen to businesses and individuals. Some of the following may include:

Hacking

This is one of the most common methods that can be a bit more difficult to prevent. Hacking is what often happens to large companies where a data breach happens. Cybercriminals will gain access to computers and from an unknown location anywhere around the world. This is used to get bank information, personal information such as identification numbers, and credit card information.

Ransomware

Ransomware is software that will usually be downloaded to the computer by accident. This could be from opening up a legitimate email and downloading files online usually. Once the file is downloaded, the criminal can then lock you out of your computer until you pay a certain amount of money or cryptocurrency.

Malware

Malware is multiple types of software such as ransomware, spyware, and viruses. This is used for theft, spying, and other crimes too. This is usually one of the most common attacks as well.

Phishing

Unfortunately, online scammers are becoming far more clever when it comes to making legitimate-looking emails and web pages. You’ll receive an email that looks real and may even have a real email address on it. This phishing technique is used to give out sensitive information such as personal info, login info, and banking details.

What can I do to protect my business?

Keep Software Updated

Cyber security monitoring software needs to be updated regularly to ensure it has patches for any loopholes and vulnerabilities that are logged, so always switch your software to ‘auto-update’ whenever you can. Manufacturers will often release updates whenever they find weak points in their software and send out updates automatically.

Talk with a Cybersecurity company

Some companies and contractors can help keep you safe from cyber attacks. This alone will immensely help in securing your data by enforcing authentication, special protocols, and putting up firewalls.

Train employees

Training yourself and training your employees for something such as an ITIL 4 certification, can be very helpful for learning more about IT and cybersecurity. Staying on top of this and truly understanding all that is happening will immensely help with preventing attacks.

Authentication Login

While learning to code would make things a lot easier, another method to protecting your business would be restricting information unless there is a sort of authentication process. This can be something such as two-factor authentication. This alone will help limit access to cybercriminals.