If you’re worried about cybercriminals obtaining your digital assets and data, you’re not alone.
The cost of cybercrime is likely to hit $8 billion in 2023, with over 40% of attacks being aimed at businesses. Cybersecurity threats lurk around every corner, which makes it all the more important to understand your own cybersecurity vulnerabilities and figure out how to correct them.
Today, we’re going to help you out by giving you some of the most important cybersecurity tips for business owners in 2023 and beyond. As long as you take these measures seriously, you’ll be able to deter and prevent cybercrime and keep your business and its customers’ data safe.
Advancing tech has given small businesses amazing things, but it’s also made them vulnerable.
Properly Train Your Employees
According to the World Economic Forum, 95% of cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error. If your employees aren’t privy to the threats that are out there, let alone how to deal with them, you’ll never be able to keep your business secure online.
Attacks come in many forms, but some of the most common are phishing, ransomware, and malware. Others come from poor passwords and other careless behavior on the business network or computers.
Thus, one of the most effective ways to eliminate cybercrime is to train your employees on how to recognize threats. If they can spot a phishing email, for example, they can avoid opening it and report it to your IT department.
Often, these emails are easy to detect. Tell your employees to look for grammatical errors in subject lines and to always check who the email is being sent from. Anything suspicious should be reported, not blindly opened.
Strong Passwords
When it comes to passwords, you need to make them strong. Gone are the days when you can get away with using the same password for each application or keeping the passwords simple so that you remember them.
Passwords should always have more than 8 characters and they should always contain a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation. Your passwords shouldn’t have anything to do with your personal life and they should be changed every 6 months.
Don’t keep all of the company passwords in a document, as this makes you vulnerable. Instead, use a password management tool to securely store the passwords where only authorized individuals can reach them.
Get An SSL Certificate
It’s not just your company’s software and data that needs protection. Your website should have a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate if you conduct transactions on it. This enhances the security of debit and credit transactions by encrypting the communication between your server and the customer’s browser.
Keep Systems Up to Date
Updating your software is an easy thing to do and makes all the difference. You have to assume that the cybercriminals are always a step ahead. Don’t let your guard down by giving them extra time to hack into your systems.
When your software is up to date, you get the latest and best security patches and fixes.
Perform Regular Backups
While you’re at it, always make sure to back up your site data. If someone hacks into your server and you’ve got no backup for the data, you’ll be in serious trouble.
Fortunately, most good servers will offer data backup protection. They should also make use of blockchain technology to more effectively protect and store files.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-factor authentication is an important tool in combatting cybercrime. To further reinforce cybersecurity defenses, integrating advanced frameworks like STIX Cybersecurity can provide structured methodologies for sharing and analyzing cyber threat information.
Thereby elevating a business’s ability to detect and respond to sophisticated cyber threats.
If your employees need to log in to access your systems, two or multi-factor authentication can provide an extra layer of security.
When the user types their password into the login screen, a second password will be sent to another device via email or SMS. Only the person with this device can receive the password, so only they can log into the website.
It’s a one-time password that resets each time someone attempts to log in to the account. This makes it extremely difficult for hackers to break into your system and steal your data.
Security Audits
Having your IT team perform regular security audits will help you prevent cybercrime as well. This comprehensive review of your business cybersecurity will indicate whether or not there are any weaknesses that a hacker may be able to exploit.
They’ll also look at your site’s coding to ensure you don’t have any security issues, as well as look into your host’s security measures. All in all, these audits allow you to take a proactive approach to cybersecurity. Doing so will help you prevent most instances of cybercrime.
Hire a Managed IT Service
Your IT team plays a major role in preventing cybercrime. These are the people that set up your cybersecurity measures and monitor your systems for security breaches. Some companies opt to hire internal IT employees, while others may decide to outsource to a managed IT service.
Hiring a high-quality managed IT provider like Corptechsolutions is a great way to boost security. With someone watching over your security measures and taking action when there’s a potential breach, you won’t have to worry as much about major cybersecurity threats. This allows you to stay focused on the success of your business.
Taking Cybersecurity Tips to Heart
These cybersecurity tips should keep your data safe and your business secure online. It’s important to know, however, that this is a full-time endeavor. There are always security threats abound and you have to stay on top of them if you’re going to avoid data loss.
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