10 Ways to Protect Your Business from a Cyber Attack

Looking for ways to protect your business from a cyber attack? 

Every organization is at risk from cyber threats, but you can limit the risks by taking precautions. Here are 10 ways to protect your business from a cyber attack.

How to Protect Your Business from a Cyber Attack in 10 Steps

No business is immune from being a target of cybercrime. 

You can think that you’re too small to be targeted, but this is almost never the case!

Instead, you need to invest in cybersecurity services, and make sure you’re taking every precaution to protect your business. 

Here are 10 steps you should take to bolster your business cybersecurity. 

1. Make Cybersecurity a Part of Your Business Culture

Business culture drives the decision-making processes in a business. 

It tells every person who deals with that business what is important to it, and this can be extremely powerful. If cybersecurity never gets talked about, or protecting data isn’t seen as a priority, then this is going to be reflected in the day-to-day decisions employees and managers make. 

By shifting the focus and making cybersecurity a part of your business culture, you instantly increase awareness and take a step in the right direction. 

2. Plan Ahead

Cybersecurity is constantly evolving, and your organization needs to be able to keep up. 

It’s one thing identifying existing risks, but cybersecurity services are about protecting you against future threats. If you’re not planning ahead, then you’re constantly reacting to what’s happening, which puts you at risk. 

This is where it pays to outsource your security to a dedicated cybersecurity company because they’re constantly working to keep you one-step ahead.

3. Train Your Staff

You’ll commonly hear it said that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. 

You can put all the best security systems in place, but they can’t always account for basic human error. Instead, you need to make your weakest links stronger and train people to take responsibility for cybersecurity.

People often ask “how to protect your business from a cyber attack,” and one of the best places to start is with training!

 4. Understand the Threats

Before you can begin to protect yourself from a threat, you have to know what it is. 

This is what’s called proactive cybersecurity, and it’s a vital part of protecting your business. Through penetration testing and other methods, you can easily identify security risks and create a strategy to protect yourself from them. 

You may think you’re most at risk from one thing when in reality, the greatest threat is something else altogether. 

5. Backup Your Data

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of backing up your data. 

When everything goes wrong, at least you can restore your systems with recent data, but only if you’ve been backing it up properly. This point isn’t about stopping breaches, it’s about limiting the impact of a breach, and it can save you huge amounts of money. 

Data is a valuable commodity and you need to treat it as such by backing it up regularly.

6. Secure Your Network

This is probably one of the first things people think of when they think of cybersecurity services - securing your network. 

It goes without saying that you want a network that protects users and makes life difficult for cybercriminals, but it’s not always that straightforward. Cyber security is constantly evolving, so you need to make sure you have experts running your network who stay up with the latest trends. 

As soon as your network security lapses, you quickly become a target.

7. Encourage Strong Passwords and Multi-Factor Authentication

We could go into some incredibly technical details when talking about cybersecurity services, but sometimes it’s the most basic elements that are the most important. 

Like encouraging people to set strong passwords and use multi-factor authentication. 

Login credentials are the gateway into your systems, and if they’re easy to guess, then anybody can gain access to them. 

Put policies in place to ensure people use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication.

8. Access Management

As we’ve mentioned already, data is an incredibly valuable resource. 

If you suffer a data breach, it can do untold harm to your business’s reputation, so you need to manage it carefully.

One of the ways you can do this is by strictly managing who has access to what data. Most employees don’t need access to all your systems and data, so you need to tailor their access to their job requirements.

9. Remember, Threats are Physical Too

Cyber threats don’t just come from hackers somewhere on the other side of the world running code to try and gain entry to your systems. It also manifests itself in a much more physical way. 

For instance, you may have a rogue employee or an upset former employee. Hackers may have given an unwitting employee corrupted hardware, a visitor might have access to your computer. 

This list of physical threats is long, and it also needs to be considered. 

10. Consider Cyber Insurance

Breaches happen, and when they do, they can cost businesses vast amounts of money. 

It is possible to cover yourself against losses with cyber insurance, and this is something that’s worth considering. 

However, it’s very hard to recover things like damage to reputation, so this should be something you consider alongside investing in small business cybersecurity services.

Now Get the Cybersecurity Services You Need

You can’t hide from the cybersecurity threats that are out there, instead, you’ve got to face them head-on. 

Cybercriminals are experts, and they spend their days perfecting their skills, so you should enlist experts on your side as well. If your business is in Australia, then those experts are the team at Stickman Cyber. 

Our experts are constantly helping businesses to stay one step ahead, and we’re ready to do the same for you.