One of the most complex things you can do is own a small business. When you own a small business, you don’t have everyone to do everything for you and you’re under an immense amount of pressure to meet deadlines, file your taxes, maintain customer to employee relationships, insurance and so much more. At the end of the day, you may be taking a cut, but you also might be thinking, “what could a hacker ever want from me?”
Unfortunately, you’re their biggest target.
Whether you’re bringing in a ton of profit or barely any, hackers target small and vulnerable businesses that probably don’t have an added layer of cyber protection. Typically, these types of small businesses have the easiest walls to penetrate. There are three areas that you should look towards to lower your risk of falling victim to a cyber-attack.
Assessing Your Potential Risk
The first thing you should do is look at the current state of your cyber security. Assess how much of a risk you actually pose to yourself and target your weaknesses. For example, if you’re low or out of inventory and your competition sees that, they’ll see it as a chance to sell that product and make a profit off of it and potentially put you out of business. In the digital world, your vulnerability could mean theft and a potential loss of customer information.
Furthermore, accounts can be compromised, and hackers could use this to their advantage. Make sure you have multi-tier authentication to prevent this, as well as minimum password requirements throughout your website to ensure a harder password is needed. Your developers, management team, and employees should all be spoken to and involved during some point of the cyber security process.
Awareness Training for Employees
Making sure your employees are well versed in the small businesses’ security ensures that they won’t accidentally leave you vulnerable to an attack. When they’re trained to prevent these attacks by sharpening up their habits and how they work on the website, you automatically lower your risk. The security and prevention doesn’t always happen from the back end, you have to take into account who uses the website or network every day and make sure they’re on board.
Password Management
As we mentioned earlier, having minimum password requirements will add a bonus layer of protection from hackers. When you have management tools to assist with this and making sure that every employee has a hard password, you’ll prevent cyber-attacks. In fact, around 50% of employees tend to recycle the same password from account to account, making it easier on them and way easier for hackers to break into their accounts.
Make sure your company doesn’t fall victim and start supporting security within your small business behind the scenes and on the frontlines with your employees. Employ these tactics to ensure streamlined security.
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