Did you know that businesses lose over $75 billion every year to ransomware alone? Cybercrimes are getting out of hand, and you need to be proactive to ensure your business doesn’t become a victim. Here are a few incredibly useful tips provided by Federal Communication Commission to stay protected:
- Employee Training: You can do your employees, customers, and the business, in general, a solid favor by investing in cyber security training. If your employees know the practices that make the system vulnerable, they can better protect the business and employee data, including personal information. Knowing which links to avoid and which files to scan before opening can make a world of difference in your business’s cyber security measures.
- Have Backups Regularly: Yes, regularly. You do not want to lose your crucial data in penetration attempts made by hackers. You need to have backups of everything in case someone wipes your servers and asks for a ransom to restore them.
- Install Anti-Virus: Talk to your IT guys and invest in a highly secure antivirus, specially made to protect businesses. Be sure to get both desktop and cyber protection to deter intermediate hackers and give a tough time to the experienced ones.
- Password Protect Devices: Besides having the computers password-protected, you need to have employees’ mobile devices secured as well. Those with sensitive data need to have a firewall set up, antivirus installed, passwords assigned, and biometric access set up for maximum safety from hacking attempts.
- Limit Data Access: Do not assign access to all the information and data to any single employee. There are two risks associated with this. First, if that employee gets hacked, all data will be compromised. Secondly, if that employee decides to commit fraud, they can sell the valuable information to competitors or stockholders. So limit the access of employees only to the data relevant to their job/titles.
- Have Secure Payment Processing: If you have an online store or use non-cash payment methods at your brick and mortar store, you need to ramp up the security. Work with your payment facilitator to make the checkout process safer.
- Get Cyber Liability Insurance: In case the data gets compromised or your business loses money to hackers, you need cyber liability insurance as your last line of protection. Losing customer data like credit card information or social security number can result in lawsuits. Cyber liability insurance can help you cover the losses and pay for court fines/fees.
Wrapping it Up:
Even though the internet has made it easier to do business and broaden the customer market for everyone, the risk of getting hacked is graver now than ever.
If you are not protected, any average Joe with some coding skills can penetrate your database, steal sensitive data and cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Therefore, take the necessary security measurements like the ones we discussed above and invest in cyber liability insurance. Call us at (860) 684-5270 to know more about this insurance policy.
