In recent years we hear more and more about cyber security. Yet many of us are left wondering what it is and why it is important. Cyber security is the way we protect our mobile devices, computers, servers, and other devices from malicious viruses.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where people sit around actively trying to figure out ways to steal your digital information. For individuals, this can mean unauthorized purchases taken from our bank accounts up to our identity being stolen. For businesses, it can mean entire data breaches where millions of our customer’s data are at risk or our reputation being at risk where we lose the trust we have worked on building for decades.
Data Breaching
Most data breaches have help from employees on the inside of a company. To avoid these happening companies need to use cyber security to monitor employees and check to see if any of their activities look suspicious or not. Companies can protect their data in several ways.
First, always conduct background checks before hiring new employees. Some potential problems can be avoided by this simple step. Often red flags can show up that can help avoid situations where you are contacting millions of people to tell them their banking and other pertinent information was stolen.
Cyber security also requires organizations have some kind of authentication programs, firewalls, software for virus prevention, and other systems in place.
Doing these simple steps can help protect your business against more sinister plots that may even include blackmailing you to extort money to get your information released back to you.
Data Security
One important step to keeping data safe is data security. Data security involves denying access to data by having steps in place to help reduce access to people. This is often done by limiting access to only a few users.
Using one of the various authentication systems to verify the user’s identity before allowing them access is another part of that process.
Encryption is another important step to protecting your data from unwanted hacks. The user must have a key or password to the data to access it.
Companies must have a backup and reset the system in place so that if they feel something has tried to access their data they can back it up and reset it. This helps unwanted changes being done to your system.
Data masking is another form of protection available to companies to help protect their data. Data masking uses techniques to change up the data using letters and special characters unless the person trying to access it is an allowed person to access it.
A Few Types of Cyber Attacks
Phishing scams are one of the most common and successful methods of cyber attack.
Spear-Phishing
Spear-phishing is an email-spoofing attack. It aims to gain entry by using an attachment to an email to gain entry into your system. These emails are sent to people within the entity and if someone opens the attachment in the email it downloads malware onto the user’s computer giving the hacker entry into the company’s system. From there the hacker can search for valuable or sensitive information. This kind of attack can locate financial information and use it to withdraw money from accounts and other types of information that will harm the company and its employees and customers.
Ransomeware
Ransomware is where a company’s data is held hostage for a ransom. Over the past few years, we have seen hospitals left helpless as their computer systems have been held for ransom. These types of cyber crimes have left patients vulnerable and often at risk of dying while huge payments were gathered for hackers. Last year we watched as our gas supply was held hostage by hackers while we waited for our government to resolve it.
How to Prevent Cyber Crime
There are many ways you can help protect yourself against cyber crimes. When used consistently together these can help prevent data crimes and protect you against losses.
The easiest place to start is with strong passwords. Never use something that would be easy to figure out. Keep passwords in a safe place. Don’t ever leave them out in the open where someone might be able to steal them. Change them regularly.
Keep the software on your computer updated. New updates are meant to address new attacks and help prevent them from being successful.
Never share your personal information. Keep it private.
Using a VPN and encrypting your passwords are good practices to follow.
Never attachments from unknown sources. Have them send you a link to the source and follow the recommendations of your browser security software when following links.
Make sure all employees at your company are following these practices and any others your cyber security team recommends for everyone’s safety online.
How Can a Cyber Security Company Help You Stay Safe?
While no business is immune from attack some companies are more likely to be attacked than others. For instance, companies dealing with financial information, technology companies, healthcare, and government entities are more likely to be hit by hackers than a lot other companies.
In 2021, over $6 trillion in damages are attributed to cyber crimes. How would those kinds of damages hurt your business? While cyber security may be costly it can certainly be less expensive than cleaning up the aftermath of a severe attack on your company. Having someone come in, BLD Forensics before an incident, and help prepare your company from an attack is much more cost-effective than waiting to hire one to repair all the damage a hacker already did.
Cyber security companies can come in and help set up firewalls, authentication systems, encryption, and other services to help protect your company.
To Conclude
Cyber security cannot be neglected without a cost in today’s society. While no one is completely immune to cyber attacks prevention is key to your online health. You must train all employees on how to stay secure and you need internal monitoring to watch for unusual activities. Constraints should be in place before an attack by a company you can trust to help safeguard your data and save you millions of dollars.
