In recent years, the number of cyberattacks has risen. Several small and mid-sized businesses have been forced to shut down, including Colorado Timberline, Hearing Services, and Brookside ENT, the last of which closed after failing to recover medical files from hackers who demanded $6,500.
Hackers have been locking businesses out of their networks, sabotaging critical infrastructure, and holding organizational data for ransom. While many victims quietly pay off the ransom without notifying law enforcement, over 200,000 organizations in the US submitted files that had been hacked in a cybersecurity attack.
Securing your business data, including sensitive documents, can be the difference between successfully evading a ransomware attack and shutting down business operations.
The following article provides practical steps on how you and your organization can secure your data, systems, and overall business.
Evaluate Your Organization’s Data and Protection Needs
Before you start implementing security measures, it’s best first to evaluate your business’ data and its corresponding protection needs.
Data evaluation involves identifying the types of data that your organization holds. This includes employee information, financial records, personal information, customer data, and IP, just to mention a few.
Different data types and business documents require different protection needs and corresponding security measures. This process also includes risk assessment, as identifying your data sensitizes you to its potential security threats and their impact on your organization.
Based on the results, you can then determine your data protection needs. These protection measures could include setting up firewalls, implementing access controls, and encrypting sensitive information, as discussed below.
However, this process is continuous as cyberattacks and threats are constantly evolving. This means that your data protection strategies should also adapt to the same.
Develop a Good Cybersecurity Culture
Developing a good cybersecurity culture involves having behaviors, actions, and beliefs that support secure data management. It involves having all your staff understand the importance of cybersecurity and take the necessary steps to maintain it.
Companies and businesses with good cybersecurity culture didn’t just stumble upon such; they worked hard to build it.
So, do you build a good security culture for your organization?
- Consider appropriate training: Good organizational cultures typically start with education. Consider providing regular cyber security awareness training for all employees to help them understand various threats and how to deal with them. The training should be centered around real-life situations.
- Implement the right policies and procedures: Security policies and procedures clearly outline what is expected from each employee. It could be as simple as password management and as complex as handling sensitive documents and systems.
- Develop an incident response plan: This involves the actions and steps an organization should take in the event of a cyber attack or security breach. This plan should be clearly outlined in a documented guideline. It should also define what constitutes a security incident or data breach and what should be done after its occurrence.
Secure Your Devices and Access to Data or Systems
Here’s a brief overview of the best security practices to secure your documents, data, and systems. We’ve also highlighted ways to secure your devices, such as laptops, desktop PCs, tablets, mobile devices, and smartphones, from cybercriminals.
Provide limited access to data and systems using role-based access control (RBAC)
Considering a significant amount of security and data breaches arise from employee oversight and negligence, it would be best to limit access (also known as limiting privileges) to confidential business documents or their corresponding information systems.
Security experts recommend users or employees be given the minimum level of data access necessary to perform their job functions. This is also known as the principle of least privilege (PoLP).
This also includes vendors or suppliers, especially those with access to your business’s sensitive data or systems. Make sure they are actively managed to meet a standard level of security. You can go as far as implementing contractual agreements that bind vendors to meet those security requirements.
Encryption
Encryption involves a program that converts documents into a format only authorized people can read. Even if an attacker manages to intercept your data, they cannot understand or read it because it’s encrypted.
Implement a Two Factor Authentication (2FA) System
This security measure requires two forms (factors) of identification to authenticate (or validate) access to an account or system. You might have interacted with a 2FA system that requires you to provide a one-time code sent to your phone, a fingerprint, or a facial recognition scan.
Using this technology, you can secure your business documents and other data, as 2FA significantly enhances security. Even if cyber-criminals get a user’s password, they would still need the second factor to gain access to the corresponding account.
This makes it incredibly difficult for criminals to gain unauthorized access to your computer systems and business documents.
Passwords
Although the message of weak passwords has been emphasized time and time again, you’d be surprised to know how many people still use their pets, children’s, or street names as their passwords.
Passwords are the first line of defense when it comes to data and account security. Hackers use sophisticated password hackers that guess millions of passwords at a go. So, using a weak password makes it incredibly easy for hackers to access a given account.
Fortunately, you can use a password generator and a reputable password manager to generate and store a strong password for you.
Software updates
Keeping your devices up to date is important in the fight against cyber attacks. Software updates usually have security patches that address various vulnerabilities that were present before. So be sure to turn on automatic updates whenever possible.
Antivirus
Having a centrally managed antivirus is essential in keeping your devices free from spyware, viruses, malware, or malicious software that download themselves to your devices without your knowledge. Such programs should be installed on all devices and kept up to date.
Secure Your Network
Network security is all about enhancing your network’s defenses and protecting its integrity. To achieve this, organizations typically employ firewalls, which manage the traffic flowing in and out of your network.
Firewalls can be hardware, software, or both. In addition to firewalls, you can also take other measures to protect your network, including virtual private networks (VPNs), high-quality antivirus software, and intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
Securing your digital marketing agency from cyberattacks starts with identifying your organizational data and its corresponding protection needs. From there, you can build a culture that emphasizes security through rigorous training and documented policies and procedures.
However, you’ll need to secure your data and the devices or systems with which it interacts with. Using a combination of antivirus software, encryption, and firewalls will help you secure your devices.
Other security solutions that will help you secure your business documents include limiting access to sensitive data and using strong passwords.
