Business | Top Tips
How secure are your systems really? Almost certainly, they are signifi cantly more insecure than you would like to believe. With the increased availability and capability of AI, cybercrime will only get more sophisticated, not less, so taking stock of how vulnerable your business really is and working out how to best to protect it is crucial. Here are seven thoughts on how to do just that.
Need a cybersecurity blanket? 1.
YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
The bad news about cybersecurity is that 85% of breaches have a human element. The good news about cybersecurity is that, because 85% of breaches have a human element, you can drastically reduce your risk simply by educating and training your staff properly. Many of the famous and frequent mistakes - leaving a laptop on a train, clicking on a link in a suspicious-looking email, the inadvertent sharing of confi dential data with a third party, using unsecured public wi-fi networks, not backing up data often enough, weak passwords - are easily avoided, providing staff are aware of the risks, know what to look out for and understand what action they need to take if they are involved in a breach.
Easy to crack passwords are estimated to be the source of 30% of data breaches but they are incredibly easy to get rid of - simply mandate that all passwords have to be a minimum of 16 characters and include upper and lower case letters, a digit and a symbol. Some companies, as we explore later, have gone even further on authentication. Experts recommend that companies go beyond the annual or biannual course and offer some - or all - of the following: training videos, posters, webinars, team training sessions and tips/ reminders in corporate newsletters.
THE GENERAL ADVICE FROM EXPERTS IS TO KEEP YOUR DIGITAL FOOTPRINT AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE
Better by design 1 | October / November 2023 The new blueprint for wide format 2.
GET TOUGH ON SOFTWARE
You probably know what software you need to keep the business running - but that isn’t necessarily the same as knowing what software your business is actually using. In particular, the popularity of APIs (a piece of technology that allows different systems to talk to each other) has facilitated cyberattacks on many companies - even businesses as large as Peloton and T-Mobile - in the past fi ve years. In an app-happy age, there is always something someone in your company will want to download in the belief that it will make them more effi cient in some way. They may well be right, but they seldom check how secure a package is or whether it meets your compliance regulations. Experts refer to such behaviour - which also includes staff letting friends and family use their corporate devices and/or using their unsecured personal devices to get work done - as ‘shadow IT’. Just one bit of software can give a hacker access to your entire system. And don’t skimp on your upgrades either - that is
the very defi nition of a false economy. Many of the patches for new versions are specifi cally designed to enhance security.
FEELING NERVY ABOUT CYBERSECURITY - OR RATHER, YOUR COMPANY’S LACK OF IT? IT’S COLD COMFORT TO SAY YOU’RE NOT ALONE, BUT THESE TOP TIPS ON HOW TO PROTECT YOUR INTERESTS SHOULD MAKE YOU SAFER.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28
