No matter the size of your business, you must protect your company data. A data breach can threaten the financial security of your organization and attack your viability. Small to medium businesses are the most common targets of hackers due to their high-reward, low-risk nature. Hackers are quite skilled that they can also hack your company’s recorder among other devices.
How Costly is a Hack?
Usually, the expenses of a data breach are devastating to small-medium businesses. The typical costs include notification and compensation costs. Notification costs include alerting affected parties and offering credit card monitoring. Credit monitoring comes with an annual fee of between $10 and $200 per person. Compensation costs include lawsuit settlements and also vary. But, the average cost of recovery is usually more than $35, 000.
Ways to Protect Your Business from Hacking
You can secure the sensitive information of your company and protect your customers by taking the following steps:
- Keep your staff informed. It is imperative to make sure that your employees understand the security protocols of your company and how to spot security risks like phishing scams. To keep them updated on the latest cybersecurity threats, consider incorporating security training into your onboarding materials and hosting security seminars.
- Use updated business software. Outdated software is usually vulnerable, make sure the programs run the latest version.
- Separate your cloud data. Don’t compile your files together in the cloud. Instead, store them by sensitivity. If you want to boost your security even more, set user permissions or keep some data offline.
- Upgrade your access controls. Take your time reviewing your requirements for passwords and usernames, as well as your number of login attempts before you lock an account. Should an employee resign, their accounts should be disabled and updated with common passwords.
- Back up data. If files are stored on-premise, back them up routinely. Depending on your setup, backups can be initiated automatically. You can also partner with an IT service provider that offers business continuity solutions to back up your data regularly.
- Keep your admin pages hidden from search engines. You should not make your admin pages visible to search engines. The reason is that these pages will appear in search results when search engines index these pages. This will make your website and its data vulnerable to hacking.
- Monitor Wi-Fi use. Especially if you have remote employees, you need to educate your staff about using Wi-Fi networks including free ones. You can secure the data they access by using a virtual private network or VPN. A VPN is a security layer that logs parties onto a secure network.
