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The Top 5 Cyber Security Steps Business Owners Need To Follow

Cyber Criminals are more active than ever, targeting all businesses; small, medium and enterprise, making it more difficult for you to protect yourself. Cybercrime is costing millions for businesses each year, who now are investing in Cyber Security Solutions to remain secure and protected from cybercrime. But the ever-changing threat landscape can be hard to wrap your head around, so we’re here to ensure your business can protect itself and maintain business continuity. Here are 5 cyber security steps to help make your organisation less vulnerable to cyber-attacks, helping you stay secure.

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Step 1: Identify What Needs To Be Protected

One of the most important cyber security septs is understanding what data has the highest priority, what information is the most sensitive, and anything else that should be protected.

Highlighting potential floors in your business model, assets, environment, and supply chain is the first step to reducing the risk of business interruption and will enable you to identify weaknesses and holes in your business’s security model. Once you have identified your business’s vulnerabilities, you can begin filling in the weaknesses with the correct cyber security to reinforce your defences.

A great way to identify your business assets and vulnerabilities is through a security assessment which will identify the security controls that are in place. Security assessments should be conducted regularly, typically once to twice a year depending on the size of your business. This is to ensure your security measures stay current with changing business needs and new technologies.

Every member of your team is a potential penetration point if not secured and trained. We would always suggest a professional security assessment as vital information could be missed leading to critical weak points. For instance, our security assessment is a comprehensive review of your entire IT estate, security experts will assess your endpoints and create a detailed road map to get your business secure. 

Step 2: Protect Your Data Against Cyber Attacks

Protecting your business’s data is an essential cyber security step. Implementing appropriate defence controls and precaution methods like:

  • Limiting access to assets
  • Providing employees with Awareness Education Training 
  • Putting processes in place to secure systems and data
  • Performing timely maintenance and repairs on network systems

As technology evolves, so does the amount of protection needed to keep your business safe due to the growing number of potential weak points and malicious equipment used by cybercriminals. As they adapt to find new ways to penetrate businesses, protective technologies such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) are essential to remaining safe. MFA enables businesses to create a second layer to their security gates. Using a personal token device such as a mobile makes it a lot harder for cybercriminals to access your account. This is done through either a unique numerical code or biometric scan meaning only you can access the data. Your team can have complete confidence that they are the only ones able to access their data. 

Anti-Virus is another way to secure your business. By using complex coding, you can make it extremely difficult for criminals to steal your personal information. This can deter criminals at the first step as it proves you take your security seriously and shows you have the correct measures in place

Step 3: Detect Signs Of A Cyber Attack

Detecting is one of the most important strategies when defending your business! You can’t respond to an attack if you don’t know it’s happening. Therefore investing in continuous monitoring solutions to detect suspicious activity and other threats is crucial to quickly respond or prevent a security incident. If an incident is not detected, criminals could steal everything from under your nose!

However, there are systems to detect and even deal with cyber threats. One is Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) software. By using advanced technology, end-users won’t have to lift a finger to know if their device is being attacked. EDR provides real time analytics into your businesses attack surface and will flag any sign of a potential attack. But what happens after something is flagged, onto the next step…

Step 4: Rapid Response

A quick response is a vital cyber security step, as soon as a cyber-attack is spotted, acting quickly means cyber criminals can’t cause devastating or lasting damage. If a cyber-attack is responded to quickly enough, the effects can be rolled back by our cyber security team. Ensuring operational continuity requires you to act fast and take the right action immediately through incident response planning, analysis, mitigation, communication, and ongoing improvement. Therefore, your business will be able to continue operations as quickly as possible with as little downtime as possible. 

End-Point Detection and Response can detect AND respond to threats against your business. The software utilises AI technology to identify, react and deal with threats to your business. The system can react almost instantly to any unknown software put on your device, isolate the malware and end the attack without you even knowing. Cyber-attacks take months of sitting quietly inside a computer gathering information, EDR will identify these malicious attacks and neutralise them.

A rapid response is everything when dealing with a cyber-attack! 

Step 5: Recovery

What happens after a cyber-attack? Depending on the damage, you may be able to roll back and recover lost data. Recover the data that may have been lost and restore services to critical systems so your business can get back to normal. The reason recovery is so imperative is due to the risk of complete data loss. Depending on the size of the business, with a correct recovery plan and tested processes, a business will be able to regain stability shortly after an attack. 

Breach Investigation – If a breach occurs, these hours will be used for us to find out how the breach occurred. We will explore all possible causes of the breach and apply the best remediation method.

Breach Remediation – If a breach occurs, these hours will be used to neutralise the threat and restore business operations. This can take a varied amount of time depending on the damage and scale of the breach.

Consultation – Any customer-generated security-related questions or discussions. This can be used to discuss the breach and damage caused. Or to stay protected, new precaution methods and cyber security to prevent this from occurring again.

Implementation – If you would like help setting up or configuring any security-related services. After the breach, you may want to update any legacy technology or improve on your cyber defences.

We hope these cyber security tips helped you realise the importance of cyber security. A strong defence against evolving cyber threats requires an always-on security mentality. But for many small and medium-sized organisations with limited resources, shifting to a more proactive approach to threat detection can be difficult. At Redsquid, we have numerous solutions and trained professionals to ensure your business stays secure at all times.

Are you ready to upgrade your business cyber security? Talk to an expert today!