Protect Your Business From Cyberattacks

Cybersecurity often drops to the bottom of the priority list for small business owners. After all, who would want to hack into my business? According to many sources, including Mastercard, cybercrooks consider small companies a prime target since they know we are often stretched thin and may not get around to doing everything we should to keep our business safe. Their goal is to get in, steal anything of value, and then lock you out until you pay a ransom.

How do we keep them out? Here are five simple things every business can do to improve the odds against getting hacked.

1. Get the right cybersecurity tools in place. Business-grade cybersecurity tools offer stronger protection because of their advanced endpoint threat detection, frequent updates, and the ability to manage your entire staff’s protection from one portal. No antivirus tool is bulletproof, but the right cybersecurity software can detect and remove the most common attacks. We like the business-class solutions from BitDefender and Trend Micro, but there are several others available that can do the job.

2. Configure your tech firewall. To help keep your business secure, every piece of internet traffic coming into your business should pass through several inspection points, called firewalls. You should have at least two firewalls; the first one is built into business-class routers, which monitor all the traffic coming into your business and can filter out many threats before they reach the rest of your network. The second failsafe firewall is integrated into the antivirus solution on each computer. 

3. Secure email traffic. This is how the hackers usually get in. Ten years ago, their approach was to email your staff a link that would download a virus, but these days, the more effective approach is pretending to be your bank/insurance/parcel carrier and asking you to call them about some issue. (Pro tip: the phone number provided does not route to your bank/insurance/parcel carrier.) While a good antivirus software is an essential piece of the puzzle, making sure your staff can spot a phishy email is crucial to keeping everything safe.

4. Back up your data. Having a backup plan for all of your company’s software and information is crucial to ensuring that your company can overcome a cyberattack. No amount of precautions will guarantee that hackers won’t get in, so it’s essential to back up your data daily to ensure you can recover if they do lock you out. 

5. Create a disaster recovery plan. If you read my posts regularly, you’ll know that I talk about this all the time. Having a plan that provides step-by-step instructions on how to recover your data backups and get them reinstalled from a computer that has failed for whatever reason is essential. 

Cybersecurity is about ensuring that your business has the tools and training in place to give yourself the best chance of keeping the hackers out and being able to recover quickly if they manage to get in. Running through the five points above is an essential first step to making your business safer and more productive. 

If you don’t have a full cybersecurity plan in place, or you’re not confident that what you have would work, feel free to book an appointment on my calendar, and we’ll be happy to help you get the right tools in place.