Hackers are increasingly targeting small- and medium-sized businesses, making it vital to have a solid plan to protect against cyberattacks. Modern cyber threats make it difficult for you to defend your organization, so we’re sharing our five best tips here and in the downloadable infosheet, What Every Business Owner Needs to Know to Protect Against Cyberattacks. Join us in an exploration of the threats to your company’s data and learn how to follow the security framework recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Five Things Every Business Owner Needs to Know to Protect Against Cyberattacks
HOW TO IDENTIFY RISKS
To begin, you must identify what data you want to protect against cyberattacks, the threats that can impact that data, and your current ability to detect and respond to those threats. Taking a good look at your critical assets, business environment, governance model, and supply chain is a critical first step to reduce the risk of data loss and business interruption due to cyberattacks.
HOW TO PROTECT SYSTEMS AND DATA
Your organization’s data should be protected with appropriate defense controls. This can include limiting access to assets, putting processes in place to secure systems and data, and performing timely maintenance and repairs on network systems. All employees should be involved in the effort to protect against cyberattacks, so be sure to provide awareness education and training. Learn more about why employee education is an important step in our previous article, Cybersecurity Tips for Employees.
HOW TO DETECT CYBERATTACKS
Detection is an important strategy to protect against cyberattacks. You can’t respond to an attack if you don’t know it’s happening, and a delayed response time can lead to more damage being done. For the swiftest defence, we highly recommend investing in continuous monitoring solutions that will detect suspicious activity and other threats. Continuous monitoring is crucial to quickly responding to or preventing a security incident.
HOW TO RESPOND TO CYBERATTACKS
A swift response is critical when you know your organization is under attack. Ensuring operational continuity requires you to act fast and take the right action immediately. These steps include incident response planning, analysis, mitigation, communication, and ongoing improvement.
HOW TO RECOVER FROM CYBERATTACKS
The final step is to recover data that may have been lost during the attack and restore services to critical systems so your business can get back to normal. It’s not enough to have a recovery plan. You also need to ensure your plan is tested, are able to coordinate restoration activities with your team and external stakeholders, and incorporate lessons learned to prevent future attacks.
– Before you continue reading –
DOWNLOAD our FREE Infosheet on What Every Business Owner Needs to Know to Protect Against Cyberattacks
For a helpful guide to share with your colleagues or keep for reference, download What Every Business Owner Needs to Know to Protect Against Cyberattacks. We’ve summarized these 5 key steps towards effective and strong cybersecurity measures.
If you’re ready to make your organization less vulnerable to hackers and improve your cybersecurity and risk management, get in touch to learn more. We’ll work with you to secure your IT infrastructure against any external threats with our Managed IT Services. Call us Toll Free at 1.866.266.7761 or use the form on our website.