3 Simple Cybersecurity Lessons for the Modern Business Environment

Sometimes the toughest lessons that hurt the most are the ones we need the most, as is the case with anything cybersecurity related. You don’t want to experience a data breach, regardless of how it’s caused, but preventing them is a bit more challenging than you might at first expect. If you want to avoid losing time, money, and reputation needlessly, then take these three cybersecurity lessons into consideration today.

Your Greatest Threats Are Also Your Greatest Defense

Some businesses ignore their most vital security assets—their employees—much to their detriment.

It doesn’t matter if you have the most advanced firewalls and other threat detection systems in place if your employees click on a phishing link or hand over their credentials to the wrong person. Social engineering attacks are increasingly finding ways to get around sophisticated defense mechanisms in favor of going through decidedly more human mediums (i.e. your employees). This is why it’s important that you train your employees on how to identify phishing scams and what they should do if they suspect they are on the verge of becoming a victim.

If your business can build a culture of security and verification, your business will be that much more likely to identify phishing attacks, verify identities, and use more complex passwords that make breaking into your infrastructure nigh-impossible.

Backups Must Be Immutable and Tested

Regardless of what you might think, a cloud sync is not the same as a verified backup, and you can’t treat it as such.

A backup that is constantly connected to the main computer or network on your infrastructure, like a mapped drive or a standard cloud sync, can potentially become infected by ransomware. This will render your backup unusable, which only makes paying the ransom more enticing; in fact, this is exactly why ransomware will ferret out your backups and encrypt them first. We recommend you use air-gapped backups that are completely disconnected from the Internet and your local network.

To further improve your chances of recovering successfully, you should add routine recovery tests into your list of scheduled maintenance to guarantee that your backups will work when you need them most. This is the difference between a data loss incident being a minor inconvenience and a business-ending disaster.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Is Mandatory, Not Optional

A simple password and username login system is not going to keep your business safe in today’s dangerous cybersecurity environment.

With methods like credential stuffing at their fingertips, cybercriminals are capable of breaking into accounts en masse using credentials that have already been stolen elsewhere online. If a massive data leak is shared on the dark web, emails and passwords can be purchased by cybercriminals, which is an incredibly dangerous situation to find yourself in. MFA puts a stop to any attacks where the cybercriminal only has access to one factor, making it all but impossible to break into a protected account without both your password and your mobile device.

Despite your employees’ grievances, you need MFA if you want to stay secure from today’s advanced cyberthreats.

More than anything, you want to make your business as expensive to hack as possible. Cybercriminals are often just looking for their next paycheck, and if you make it so difficult to hack you that it’s not worth the time or effort, you’re doing yourself a favor. To make yourself as difficult to hack as possible, we recommend working with Quercus IT. Our trusted professionals will reinforce your infrastructure with enterprise-grade tools designed to prevent data breaches. Learn more today by calling us at (780) 409-8180.