Improving Your Business’ Cyber Security

In an increasingly digital world, cyber security is a crucial concern for any business with a digital element, whether an extensive online platform or simply a network of internal computer systems. Cyber-attacks continue to be on the rise, posing a real – and expensive – risk to companies of all sizes. But exactly why is it important? And how can you improve your business’ cyber security?

Why Do You Need Cyber Security?

Cyber security is a relatively wide-reaching discipline, encompassing the safety of data, records, and finances in the digital realm. Cyber-criminals can steal important and confidential information in a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons; they may want to extort the company for the return of important documents or sell valuable data and information to third parties. More commonly, cyber criminals target a business’ coffers through simpler means.

Whichever the reason, cyber-crime comes at a significant cost to its victims. It can also affect your company’s reputation in your industry and with customers, where a poor cybersecurity measure can lead to a lack of trust in your offering. Thankfully, cybersecurity can be significantly bolstered by paying attention to specific aspects of your business and its security, and by using tools like Webauthn.

Protecting Payments

Ensuring customer security when purchasing your product or service online is paramount. Repeat customers will likely have their credit card information stored with you, as well as other forms of personal information. This data could be vulnerable to attack, so must be stored securely. Open banking platforms help protect customers by encrypting payments, making certain that information cannot be scraped from transactions; passwords stored locally should be hashed, in order that they cannot be decrypted if stolen.

Employee Training

While cybercrime can seem like a complicated, hi-tech corner of criminal activity, it is actually people that form the weakest link with regard to cybersecurity. The single most common form of cybercrime in the US by far is phishing, whereby a cyber criminal pretends to be a trustworthy or authoritative source in order to garner sensitive information from a person, whether bank details or passwords.

As such, training is the single most effective way to counteract cybercrime in your business. Ensuring your employees are taught how to recognize potentially fraudulent correspondence can prevent the giving away of sensitive information, while the implementation of internal multi-step processes to the approval of information requests can prevent even the most accidental of leaks.

Along with employee role training, please ensure that you equip your company with Identity and access management so that they have access to the right tools to get the job done.

Need-to-Know Basis

Information is the core item of value in any cybercrime, and the flow of that information can affect the success of a given scam or crime. Mitigating employee knowledge of sensitive information, or of the location of confidential files, can prevent the flow of information out of the company; by keeping specific information on a need-to-know basis, only staff with authority can administrate the sharing of information.