Small Businesses Can’t Hide From Cybercriminals - Are You Safe?

Small Businesses Can’t Hide From Cybercriminals

You might believe that your small size will keep you safe – but the data says otherwise.

Sorry to break it to you, but in almost half of all the cyber breaches that have occurred, a small business was the target. Consider these stats reported in Verizon’s Data Breach Report and Forbes:

• 58% of all breaches in 2018 involved small businesses.
• 43% of all breaches involved small businesses in 2019.

What Makes Your Small Business A Prime Target?

Because you’re probably not doing enough to protect yourself. You make an easy target for that cybercriminals. According to the 2019 Shred It Protection Report:

• 31% of small business owners report that human error or accidental loss by a staff member led to a data breach.
• 33% of respondents have not trained employees on cybersecurity best practices to defend them against phishing and ransomware.
• 30% of small business owners have no policy for storing confidential documents.

How Can You Enhance Your Small Business Cybersecurity?

The fact is that while firewalls, antivirus software, and conventional remote monitoring are important parts of cybersecurity, they’re not enough on their own.

In order to find your vulnerabilities and eliminate them, you should consider the following three advanced cybersecurity tips:

Audit & Assess Your Cybersecurity

You can’t afford to assume that your cybersecurity measures and practices are keeping you safe. You need to know for sure.

The best way to do so? Have your cybersecurity assessed.

• Security Measures: The assessment will determine the strength of your current passwords, the validity of any firewalls in place, and any implementations of control lists that determine what users have access to sensitive information.

  By ensuring these security standards are properly configured and up-to-date, your system will be that much more difficult to compromise.

• Reliable Failsafes: Despite best efforts, even the strongest security measures can be overcome, whether it's a data breach or an unexpected emergency on your premises. An assessment will verify that you have regular backups kept at on- and off-site locations that can be relied upon in the case of any disaster.
• Comprehensive Maintenance: If your security measures are not updated regularly they can become ineffective quickly. In the course of an assessment, you can make sure that your security settings meet industry standards, that maintenance programming is configured to operate automatically, and that any past employees have been removed from the system (a dangerous error that is often overlooked).

Train Your Employees

A comprehensive cybersecurity training program will teach your staff how to handle a range of potential situations:

• How to identify and address suspicious emails, phishing attempts, social engineering tactics, and more.
• How to use business technology without exposing data and other assets to external threats by accident.
• How to respond when you suspect that an attack is occurring or has occurred.

How Can You Strengthen Your Small Business Cybersecurity?

The best way is to ask for help – EPC IT Solutions will help implement robust security measures, deploying security devices like firewalls, patching, antivirus software updates, intrusion and gateway protection, to name a few.

Furthermore, we will support your cybersecurity processes and practices, by implementing 2-factor authentication, employee security training, and password reset policies for your company.

Like this article? Check out the following blogs to learn more:

In-House IT vs. Outsourced Support in 2019

66% of malware is installed via this…

Cyber Security Awareness What is the Dark Web?