Modern Cybersecurity Threats to Your Business

Cybersecurity is one of the most discussed issues facing the today's businesses; cybercrime has increased significantly while businesses have moved more of their processes onto the computer. Planning how to protect your organization's critical digital resources from corruption and theft has never been more imperative. Below we take a look at some of the issues affecting small and medium-sized businesses' ability to do business effectively.

The whole point of doing all of this is to secure your organization’s investments. You’ve paid for the services, hardware, software, and the time that it has taken to create and store the data, so it only makes sense that you should make the effort required to protect it. By protecting your data, you are protecting your staff, your customers, your vendors, and your business. You wouldn’t just leave a bag of cash in plain sight inside the front door of your business unless it was locked and you could ensure that no one was coming through it, would you? The same precautions should be taken for your digital assets that, make no mistake about it, are being targeted.

Protecting Business Computing

A business’ computing infrastructure is bigger and supports many more services than it ever has in the past. Thus, we have to start outside the network itself. Cloud services are a large part of modern business. When they are hosted outside of your network, they are managed by a third-party and one would think they have their own security team handling cybersecurity. Naturally, this can’t be guaranteed, but you would think that if a business is selling processing, applications, or storage over the Internet that their business model depends on their systems remaining secure.

For the end-user to access these systems there is a dedicated access control program attached. Many times businesses will require users to set up two-factor authentication to get the most out of the access control system that accompanies the cloud solution. In the cloud, many different types of software, hardware, and other services are accessible.

Going the Extra Mile

There is now security solutions called Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) or Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). These solutions aren’t mutually exclusive; IDS’ function is to tell administrators that there has been a security breach, while an IPS is designed to keep these threats out by attempting to block suspicious activity. An IPS also logs all network traffic, an often significant undertaking, to make sure that administrators can review, and try to isolate any potentially unauthorized action or file that enters the network.

Years ago, this would have been enough to remain secure against these threats. Today, it’s only the beginning. If you think of a computing network like an onion, every “layer” of the network will get its own access control system and its own firewall. This way each part of a computing network, from the perimeter, to the applications, to the databases where all the data is held are all protected by a different source of encryption. By setting up a tiered access control system that requires authentication in multiple places, it makes it harder for unauthorized access. It also secures your organization against one of the biggest threats that it faces each day: phishing attacks.

A phishing attack is a cyberattack where an outside entity tries to pass off fraudulent correspondence as legitimate. According to Verizon, 90 percent of all network attacks are the result of successful phishing attacks. There's only one thing that can keep phishing attacks from being a huge problem for your company: Training.

Training Your Employees

Getting your staff trained on phishing may not seem like a priority. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

You have to comprehend the fact that, since encryption and cybersecurity solutions are so good, taking them on directly takes far more time and resources then going after your staff does. Through your employees is the only way in for many of these modern hackers, and they are going to use your staff as the vessel to get where they want to go...unless you stop them.

Training your staff about phishing and other types of social engineering scams is the best way to keep unauthorized people out of your network. No firewall is going to help you if they access your network with legitimate credentials. Keeping credentials secure and requiring authentication can go a long way toward saving your business from dealing with data breaches, malware, and any other type of hacker-induced network security problem.

If you would like help finding the proper cybersecurity strategy for your business’ needs consider the IT professionals at Macro Systems a good solution. Call us today at 703-359-9211 to learn more.