Advice on Cybersecurity for Small Businesses

A new business’s setup might be challenging. All of a sudden, you have to take care of paying the salaries of other people, filing business taxes, and trying to turn a profit. Your company being hacked is the last thing you want to happen.

Being hacked can lead to the theft of sensitive information about your clients and staff as well as financial loss for your company.

We frequently witness start-up companies overlooking cyber security. When it comes to technology, they are so preoccupied with saving money that they don’t take the time to ensure its safety.

We are aware that many people launch new enterprises on a tight budget and that cyber security is renowned for being costly and requiring an IT department to handle all the additional work it generates.

These suggestions for small-business cyber security are geared toward traditional Small and Medium Enterprise companies. The requirements for application security for software development organizations are not covered in this article, nor are startup specifics. Here is a simple checklist of the most important cyber security precautions that every small business owner can and should take.

You can choose whether or not your company may use these cybersecurity recommendations in this way. Most likely, you must show this to your CISO and have him or her verify to see if anything from the list is missing if you have (1) a full-time cyber security manager and (2) a dedicated cyber security budget. This guide is only for you if you are lacking in either of the two.

1. Top Tips For Cybersecurity For Your Business

All of the advice we’ll provide in this part is free or extremely inexpensive and was created with small businesses in mind. Without having to pay a lot of money, we want you to be able to defend yourself.

Here are some suggestions to raise your company’s degree of cyber security.

1.1 Maintain Software Updates

Let’s start with the idea that is the easiest to implement but is so commonly missed.

You must ensure that all of your company’s PCs, laptops, tablets, phones, and other gadgets are kept up to date. Additionally, you must make sure that you monitor the software and any security holes that may have been discovered in it.

Even though it seems so easy, a surprising number of people avoid updating their computers because they believe it to be a waste of time. They repeatedly press the “remind me later” button up until six updates are waiting to be downloaded.

Why is it crucial to keep your devices’ software updated?

Companies employ this tactic to ensure that users update frequently: many devices won’t function properly unless they have been fully updated.

It’s also important to remember that the majority of the updates that Windows and IOS prompt us to apply are security system patches. When these organizations’ teams find a bug in their work or learn about fresh security risk, they provide an update that will fix the issue.

You run the risk of any of these problems if you don’t update the program.

So, as a business owner, what can you do to ensure that all of your devices are fully updated? We advise you to set aside one hour each week to perform a technology audit and ensure that all devices utilized in a store or internally that multiple people have access to are as current as feasible.

We advise you to set up a chain of accountability for individual computers or laptops so that users are required to inform a supervisor that they have updated whenever a new version is made available.

As an alternative, you might want to enable automatic updates on all devices used by the business.

1.2 Select a VPN

Virtual Private Networks are VPNs. For small firms that cannot afford their internal network or for team members who work from home, VPNs are an excellent tool.

Employees should utilize VPNs at home because their cyber security there is probably weaker than it is in any of your office buildings. A worker attempting to access sensitive or crucial data from a wider network may compromise the security of the entire business.

A VPN should be used by anyone accessing your company network or anything else linked to work over a public wifi network; we’ll cover this further later.

How do you implement VPN use across your entire company?

Starting, you should decide which VPN provider you want your staff to utilize. Free software and VPNs should be avoided wherever possible. They will increase the chance of getting hacked.

There are several reasonably priced VPN choices available, and many of them provide a small company discount or a discount for multiple licences.

The VPNs should then be installed by everyone in the business. The VPN can then be activated whenever they need to view private data. (To make the process more simple, the majority of them also have browser extensions.)

This is a quick and low-cost solution to improve the online safety of your company.

1.3 Implement password managers

Hackers will try to break passwords as long as we continue to utilise them in order to access legitimate user accounts. 61 percent of all data breaches used user credentials, according to Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report.

Creating passwords that are impossible to guess and adding an extra authentication factor are the two strategies to reduce this danger. Both are easy and straightforward, although they take some getting accustomed to. The good news is that after the transition is complete, users will spend less time authenticating because they won’t need to input their passwords anymore because the autotype feature or corresponding browser extensions will fill them in for them.

Your staff members can only ever need to remember two passwords thanks to a password manager. One to open the password safe in the password management programme, where all other passwords are safely saved, and another to access their workstations or laptops.

You can require your staff to create lengthy, random passwords because password managers are so easy to use and because users won’t have to remember passwords going forward. Additionally, cyber security helps to create a more productive workplace as a benefit.

1.4 Make use of two-factor authentication

The ability to technically enforce two-factor authentication gives it a significant edge over password managers, which are both simple to set up. Users using password managers are given the option to lengthen and randomly generate their passwords, but they are still free to pass up the chance. Instead, users can be made to give a temporary code or a physical token in order to log in using two-factor authentication.

The second factor is accepted in some capacity by almost all contemporary applications. The simplest is a temporary password that is sent through SMS to a user’s personal phone. You should stay away from this one because it is the least secure. We advise employing hardware tokens for users with high privileges or accounts in crucial systems, and one-time passwords (OTP) created by mobile apps for all other user accounts.

1.5 Carry out backups

Although they are not at the top of our list, backups are your most crucial sensitive data protection measure. If you do not routinely back up your systems and data, a full-stop cyber security incident like a ransomware attack can be disastrous. Your company’s ability to continue operating in the event of a compromise is directly correlated to how frequently and well your backup copies are made.

The cloud can be the best option for a SME because it is essential to create backup copies at a separate location. This method is never free and costs money based on how much storage is used, how many people use it, how many machines are involved, or any mixture of all three.

1.6 Reduce your attack surface by performing regular self-scans.

You must understand how hackers can target your company if you want to keep it safe. Hacking entails using software and systems in a way that their developers and owners did not intend. Malicious  Hackers want to ruin you and your company. Consequently, you must always be aware of the systems you have, their locations, and the services they provide.

As a result of opening associated services, such RDP, VNC, or SSH, to the internet in order to access their systems remotely, many small businesses become attacked. By attempting the top 100 most used passwords from previous password leaks, hackers frequently guess the passwords for these services. Once inside, they simply utilise the user account that has been compromised to encrypt all of the data and seek compensation.

Strong authentication, random password requirements, and the use of two factor authentication prevents it, but if the service has known security vulnerabilities, it makes no difference. The risk is decreased by applying security fixes automatically and hiding behind a firewall. However, there is still a chance that you can be compromised, which you can avoid by disabling any potentially susceptible unused services. Yes, you might not even be aware that they exist, and getting rid of them wouldn’t have any impact on you.

The issue is, where do you look for them? This one is simple: execute regular discovery scans to keep track of your “assessment scope,” as we like to say. Run network scans after that to discover which services are active on your hosts and look for any known security holes. Of course not manually; there are tools for that.

Update a susceptible service to the most recent version of security whenever you think you’ll need it. But even if the service is “clean,” consider whether you really need it available online. If not, disable it, disable network access, or block it on the firewall.

1.7 Consolidate logging

Logs are essential for any investigation into a security issue. Unauthorised users trying to connect to the Wi-Fi access point are just one example of a security event; others include full-scale organisation compromises, data breaches, or ransomware attacks. In any case, if you don’t have logs, you have no idea what actually happened and can’t figure out how to avoid it in the future.

One crucial aspect of the logs is that, like backups, they must be kept apart from the common systems and applications. They must not be rendered useless by a catastrophic occurrence, and hostile hackers must not be able to erase any evidence of their existence. Another crucial element is the central storage of logs, which are necessary to correlate events across many systems and understand what is happening within the business. Logs must, of course, be consistently backed up.

Once your logs are gathered and saved, you can begin routinely or even instantly evaluating them. Set up alerts to receive timely notifications about potential security incidents. But proceed with caution, as it can be unnecessary for a small business.

1.8 Utilise canary tokens

The idea behind canaries is straightforward: you can receive notifications of certain actions taken by hackers against your systems during cyberattacks. Canary tokens are an example of what are now known as “cyber deception technologies,” and they come from the ancient technique of network “honey pots.” Some canary tokens are free to use for SMEs.

Hackers are drawn to canaries, which are bits of data like files, documents, or API tokens. For instance, a fake password that is hardcoded into the source code of your application or a passwords.xlsx spreadsheet on a file server. Making canaries and placing them across your infrastructure is an artistic endeavour, but be careful not to overdo it because too many canaries will disrupt business as usual.

1.9 Use entry-level endpoint security tools

Remember that the workstations and laptops of the staff, where the actual work is done, need to be protected. All computers must have a built-in firewall activated, and the real-time protection and daily full scan options for the most basic antivirus software should be selected.

Additionally, security configuration settings need to be reviewed frequently. An outstanding open-source project called OS Query makes it possible to gather this information from remote systems using SQL-style queries.

2. Conclusion 

One of the most crucial things a business owner can do is protect their company against cyberattacks and threats. It is your duty to ensure the security of both your company and your employees.

I hope that your business will find this content useful. Although there are numerous ways to increase security, this is the bare minimum that should be in place in any business. However, what could the next steps be?

We advise concentrating on these actions once you have finished the aforementioned checklist and wish to invest time and resources to moving forward.

  • Create a workplace culture that values privacy. Install a server and allow people to use it, or encourage everyone to use a reliable VPN service. All employees’ privacy will be enhanced as a result, and since you now know where your co-workers may join from, you may apply IP-based network rules more effectively.
  • Numerous delectable security nuggets are available for macOS users that are either free or reasonably priced. Controlling where your client-side applications connect to and deciding if they should have this capability are both quite easy to do using Little Snitch and other tools from its family of products.
  • Try to organise everything once you’re ready. Although you might get there one day, we are not referring to a formal Information Security Management System as in the ISO/IEC 27001 standard. We are focusing more on a fundamental technique or framework that corresponds to a recognised set of standards. 

Once you begin to wonder about these things, get in touch and Contact Us so we can discuss your prospects.

 

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