Since the world has gone digital, with around 5.35 billion individuals having access to the Internet, it has become more crucial to secure your online business. This is especially true considering that a small percentage of this number is up to no good and is looking to steal customer data from companies.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a small, medium, or large firm—implementing proper cybersecurity measures will prevent hackers from penetrating your security and stealing data or money from your business.
In this blog post, you’ll get to learn about four vital security tips that will protect your online venture. Let’s dive into these.
Table of Contents
1. Subscribing to an Antivirus Service
Krishi Chowdhary’s carefully curated list of the best antivirus software helps you to protect your online business from cyber threats. Entrants help you block phishing attempts, preventing viruses, malware, and ransomware from getting into your system. Additionally, they regularly update their malware databases, which improves their ability to counter new threats. This proactive manner of handling cybersecurity helps to maintain the integrity of your business operations.
Perhaps the most crucial function of any antivirus service is to detect and prevent threats in real-time. This translates to the non-stop monitoring of files and programs that you download or access on your computer. Although you can choose to scan devices at any time of your choosing, real-time protection is doubly important because any delay in detecting malware can trigger the loss of your files, finances, and customer data and erode trust in your business.
The best antivirus software ensures real-time monitoring using a heuristic analysis technique that scrutinizes the behavior of files and applications to pick out suspicious patterns. As a result, even if the malware isn’t in the antivirus’s malware signature database, it can still be prevented from damaging your system.
It is also crucial that your choice of antivirus software protects you from phishing attacks. Antivirus programs prevent phishing attacks through email scanning, web filtering, and content analysis.
Email scanning involves scrutinizing your inbox for elements that resemble phishing. The key things that the antivirus looks out for are weird domain names and unusual sender addresses.
Web filtering works when the antivirus has a comprehensive list of phishing websites. Once any of the systems used in your online business tries to access any website, the software checks the URL address against its database of phishing websites and prevents access if it is indeed a phishing site.
The content analysis technique examines text and links in an email or web page to detect the use of urgent language. Typically, scammers use urgent language to trick a victim into providing sensitive information. Once this style of text is detected, it blocks access to the website.
2. Implementing Strong Password Policies
When an individual uses a weak password, even amateur hackers can penetrate the account. You need to mandate that everyone working and actively using the systems in your online business uses strong and unique passwords. For instance, if you run businesses like anonymous casinos, an e-commerce platform, or any other business that collects sensitive data, you can include a password strength meter on your signup page for new users.
Your system must only accept passwords that are at least 8 characters long. The longer a password, the lower the probability of it being cracked. To make the password more difficult to crack, you should ensure users use a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.
Next, you can add a password manager to the mix. Password managers are helpful because they allow users to easily manage their passwords and reduce the likelihood that they will lazily reuse the same password for multiple sections or accounts. Also, since these passwords are safely stored in the password management service, the risk of exposure and compromise becomes really low.
Another password policy you should consider is requiring all users to update their passwords at least once every three months. Changing your password once every 90 days guarantees that even if a password gets compromised in a leak, it would be useless before any hacker can do any real damage.
Updating Software Regularly
The solutions are not always overly complicated; for whichever reasons companies prioritize cybersecurity, protecting user data is crucial but can also be as simple as updating your software regularly. Cybercriminals are always looking for loopholes in software code that they can leverage to gain unauthorized access to a system. Once they exploit this code to obtain customer details, they can leak the data online.
Software you want to make sure to always update includes your computer’s operating system, its applications, and app plugins. Failing to update this software means you’re leaving these cracks open for hackers to access. An example of this can be observed in the WannaCry ransomware attack, which affected 200,000 Windows computers across 150 countries. Microsoft had earlier patched its operating system, but users of Windows systems, including the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), failed to download the new update.
Since patient data was encrypted in the attack, thousands of appointments and surgeries had to be canceled. Globally, billions of dollars were lost because of irregular software updates.
To ensure that your software remains updated, you need to keep an inventory of your software so that you don’t leave out any software when you’re performing updates. Next, you have to enable automatic updates; activating automatic updates ensures that patches get implemented immediately when they’re available and lessens the risk of omitting any update on your list.
Also, you need to dedicate time at least once every 21 days to manually check for updates since some programs don’t allow automatic updates.
Performing Regular Backups
There may be times when you do everything right and still lose your data, or there might be the occasional slip-up. So, it is always best to be prepared for even such times. Losing all the data collected for your online business can spell irreversible trouble that you are better off avoiding, which is why you need to create backups.
The frequency of your backups needs to be in tandem with the rate at which data is entered into your business. If your business works with a large amount of data, you need to make real-time backups. Ventures that handle a lot less data can perform updates weekly.
For the location where you’ll store the data, you need to follow the 3-2-1 rule—3 copies, 2 mediums, and 1 offsite copy. Three copies mean you need to have at least three separate copies of your data. Two mediums refer to keeping the copies on two different storage types, like cloud storage and a hard drive. One offsite copy means storing the data in a separate physical location in case of a fire or natural disaster.
There are various types of backups, including full and incremental backups. Full backups copy all of your data every time, regardless of whether it has changed. Nevertheless, it is slow and demands a high storage space. Incremental backups check for areas where data has changed or added. They are faster than full backups and don’t need as much storage space.
Conclusion
If you’re running an online business, there’s a high chance of getting targeted by a cybercriminal and having your customer data or funds stolen. That’s why you need to implement cybersecurity measures like subscribing to an antivirus service, implementing strong password policies, updating software regularly, and performing regular backups.