How to improve your cyber security and why COVID is not the only virus that could disrupt your business. 

To mark national Safer Internet Day, our Technical Director, Luke Whitelock, shares 5 ways to improve your cyber-security and protect your business. Cybercrime has increased significantly during the pandemic. Whatever your business, you will manage large amounts of information that could be valuable to criminals.   It is crucial you take steps, not only protect your clients’ information, but also to avoid costly downtime if something does go wrong. 

1 – Back up your data.  

Regular and thorough back up of all your data is one of the best and easiest to protect your business in the event of a cyber-security breach.  Make sure you are backing up your data to a cloud-based solution on a regular basis.  Check the back-ups.  If your data is properly backed up and something goes wrong, you can restore lost data.  This is essential for business continuity.  There are some great solutions that can act as a temporary bridge for your business systems in case of a loss of service while things are fixed.  We recommend this to all our customers to minimise any downtime which is both costly and inconvenient.  

2 – Keeping devices safe  

Make sure that all devices used by your staff, whether personal or work, are kept secure by applying all software updates on a regular basis. This can really help stop attacks on vulnerabilities exploited by criminals or in the event of loss or theft of any devices.  Make sure that all devices used for work are encrypted and compliant with frequent updates applied. 

3 – Restrict access 

Limit the access of employees to your internal data.  By reducing the number of people who have access to company information and files, you limit the risk. Use additional passwords for all confidential data as an extra layer of security to make sure only those who really need to access something can. 

4 – Passwords and 2FA 

You should have a password policy and share it with all your employees. Your password policy should advise all staff use a secure password manager like LastPass. 2 Factor Authentication is another essential tool that should be part of your password policy.  There are many different free APPs which enable 2FA and it’s a simple way to add another layer of protection. 

5 – Avoiding phishing attacks 

Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a huge increase in phishing attacks using both ransomware and malware.  The simplest way to protect against these is to train your staff to spot the attack before it happens. We recommend regular training and testing of your staff.  There are some great tools out there to help businesses do this quickly and regularly.  We even use this on our own staff! 

If you want have a question about being safer with your cyber-security please get in touch with [email protected] or book a chat with one of our team here https://iqi.click/cybercal