Protect Your Important Data: Get Solid Protection

Protect Your Important Data: Get Solid Protection

Data is power and must be treated with care.

A lot can go wrong when handling sensitive data; from losing control of your company’s finances, to compromising customer privacy or exposing trade secrets through theft – but there are ways you can avoid these pitfalls: First we need protection because who knows what might happen?

  1. Businesses should know what data they have, where it resides, and who can access it. You may think that this is a basic requirement for business security, but the majority of businesses fall short here, leaving themselves exposed to a range of serious risks.
  2. Limit exposure by restricting access permissions according to the role – so only those with a need to know to have access to data or its location – something as simple as giving an employee read-only access rather than read/write could avoid potential exposure if their account is compromised, hacked or they leave your employment.
  3. Employee health checks are another way you can safeguard information – checking devices for malware and disabling USB ports will minimize exposure from removable media such as external hard drives.
  4. Password policies are also essential when trying to enforce good security. A strong password with minimal character count, numbers, and symbols will make it difficult for hackers to brute force their way in, compared to a short password with only letters that could easily be guessed.
  5. Limit your risks by educating your employees on best practices in how they manage passwords – enforcing this through education initiatives or software tools is the best way you’ll find compliance in your business, rather than relying on an individual’s willpower.
  6. Protecting against factors outside your control requires preparation, so you can react quickly if there is ever an incident. This includes things like disaster recovery plans – which ensure who needs to be involved at what stage of the response process according to roles within the business, but also that the safeguarding procedures are in place to protect both your data and any individuals who may be attacked.

This is where you’ll get into the nitty-gritty of understanding how attacks actually work and how they were executed once identified – so you can harden your defenses against similar future attacks.

As we’ve highlighted before, good security doesn’t only help if an attack occurs, it also helps keep your business safe day-to-day by protecting against scams and giving employees a swift route through which issues can be raised and resolved.  It’s worth considering that there isn’t just one type of attacker here, but several with different motivations for conducting an attack on your business – whether this is simply financial gain for themselves or whether they are trying to access internal information or even embarrass your company.  Let’s take a look at some different types of attackers you need to be aware of.

These are employees, contractors, business partners, or anyone else that is exposed to the inner workings of your corporate network on a regular basis – someone with access privileges who might use this for their own malicious intentions. These people can pose an advanced cybersecurity risk by having legitimate access rights and knowledge of system infrastructure which they could potentially abuse for personal gain – whether this is a financial gain (selling sensitive data on the black market), spying (stealing information like intellectual property) or simply disruption (withholding critical services in order to blackmail).