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Cybersecurity has become a focal point for businesses over the last decade, especially in recent years. Data breaches can be detrimental, and it’s vital to know how to protect your company from such events.
This article will explain 5 effective cybersecurity measures that companies can implement to significantly reduce the risk of data breaches.
Manage Your Passwords
Weak or stolen credentials are one of the leading causes of data breaches. Unfortunately, many companies, including large corporations, continue to use weak passwords. This enables threat actors to easily guess or hack passwords, which can result in a devastating data breach.
Short and easy-to-remember passwords are more convenient. But using strong and unique passwords doesn’t mean they need to be difficult to manage and remember. By using special software, you can keep business passwords safe and easily accessible.
Besides strong passwords, employees should also use 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication). It asks for two methods (authentication factors) to verify identity when logging in. This ensures that the person trying to access the data is who they say they are.
Educate Your Employees
The level of cybersecurity awareness within your company starts with employees. In 2021, U.S. companies alone lost $4.2 million on average due to ransomware attacks. This kind of malware usually gets into a system by fooling employees with phishing scams or other methods. That’s why it’s extremely important for employees to stay vigilant. Organizations must assume that they’re a target and increase cybersecurity awareness. The easiest way to achieve this is by investing in employee education.
The best way to educate your employees on any topic is by investing in an online training course. The course should include the main cyber dangers that are out there and ways to stay protected.
Encrypt All Data
Encrypting your data ensures its confidentiality and protection as it’s stored on organization networks or shared through the internet or other computer networks. This happens because encrypted data turns regular text into scrambled text using a secret code (encryption key). Only people who have the key can access the encrypted data.
Data encryption is currently one of the most popular measures organizations put in place to protect their data.
Update Software Regularly
Threat actors are always scanning the software that people use to find any vulnerability to cause damage. Luckily, software creators, at least larger ones, also do the same to prevent the bad guys from using their software to inflict damage to their users.
To address these vulnerabilities, software manufacturers release regular updates. These updates improve the software’s security and patch vulnerabilities. Thus, if you’re operating on older software versions, you’re significantly more vulnerable to a data breach.
Perform Vulnerability Assessments
A vulnerability assessment is the process of analyzing, identifying, and prioritizing security vulnerabilities found throughout a company’s networks. It aims to find exploitable weaknesses in a company’s network and also provides solutions to address these weaknesses whenever possible.
Thanks to various scanning apps that provide network, web application, and protocol scanning, organizations can schedule automatic scans for all parts of their network. This enables them to identify all vulnerabilities that could lead to a data breach.
Some threats that a vulnerability assessment can identify are:
- Code injection attacks (SQL, XSS, or other types)
- Escalation of privileges due to faulty authentication systems
- Unsecured software, and many more.
Conclusion
These days, each business is vulnerable to cyber attacks. That’s why business owners must stay educated on the threats they face and they should implement as many cybersecurity measures as possible. These 5 are the perfect place to start.
