All businesses nowadays need to have an online presence in order to remain competitive in their respective industries.
Having a website creator make a secure and responsive website is just one of the things entrepreneurs make sure to have when they launch their business.
However, with technology advancements, no website is completely safe from various security vulnerabilities. Any business — whether big or small — can face major security risks from cyber attackers and other criminals looking to take advantage of non-secure sites.
From malware infiltration to a careless employee, there are so many security threats that businesses face every day.
However, knowledge is always power. In that regard, here are some major security risks most small businesses experience and how to protect your business against them.
Security flaws are everywhere
In today’s digital world, several challenges arise from how interconnected and networked the current marketplace is. For instance, social networking is a good example of a business and technology advancement. It has brought small businesses closer to their customers.
However, it also increases the security risks for the business. As your employees or sales representatives engage in networking and sales across various social networking platforms, new pathways into your business open up quite easily. Cyber attackers make it their mission to know how to exploit those avenues.
One of the best and most effective ways to protect your business against this security risk is to provide proper knowledge to people associated with your company. Many people don’t understand how cyber attackers leverage social technologies and tools to again access to their information.
In this case, a simple weekly or bi-weekly security updates and orientation on how to effectively avoid risks is a very important approach to ensure your user base is well informed and avoiding any risky activity on the internet.
Weekly updates also enable you and your staff to be always accountable for security, and also incorporates you and your employees into the business’ security solutions.
Cyber attackers don’t discriminate
Small businesses often assume that cyber criminals only target large and well-established businesses. It’s not true.
Cyber attackers don’t choose their victims. They exploit any opportunity that comes in their way.
Therefore, while larger businesses usually opt for powerful corporate-owned gadgets, there are several tools that can help you secure proprietary data/information, especially when accessed by personally-owned gadgets.
Even if your security strategy isn’t as expensive or as comprehensive as those used by large corporations, creating roadblocks particularly on the way to your exposed business data/information is an important tactic to prevent any possible security threat to your business.
Imbalance in security
Sophisticated phishing attacks are the fastest growing threats nowadays. If these threats are not identified and stopped, they can cause huge losses for businesses.
If you are a small business owner, you need to be smart when it comes to balancing your in-house security resources as well as building a great team, while leveraging all third-party security services.
There are several third-party security services that you can use now, and a lot of them are SaaS-based which don’t need investment in hardware and are typically easier to deploy.
Perhaps the most crucial thing is to take security risks seriously and to assess all your security measures proactively. Many small businesses don’t take their online security seriously until something goes wrong.
Generally, after a serious security breach, it will be much more costly to clean up than to prevent it from happening in the first place.
People are a liability
People always remain the major security risk for any business. As cyber security threats are increasingly becoming more sophisticated every day, even careful and committed employees may become victims themselves by accidentally opening files or attachments with malware or viruses.
In this case, the best way to defend your business against them is to ensure that you and your employees get adequate and consistent education in order to keep your business security at the top of everyone’s mind.
Proper security education and training is actually what most larger businesses have embraced to maintain their security plan.
Configuring the firewall and walking away isn’t enough when it comes to matters of online security. Every business should consider bringing in a third party to get a proper security vulnerability assessment.
In a nutshell, protecting sensitive business data and information from hackers and other cyber criminals should always be the first priority for any website creator.
These security threats often come in the form of malware and phishing, which seek to infiltrate the cloud applications you use, your business network, and your endpoints.
It’s therefore advisable to update patches as soon as they appear, use proper security tools that can help protect your entire IT attack, and more importantly, you and your staff should have security awareness.
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Originally published at www.bookmark.com on June 14, 2016.
