How To Protect Your Company From Hackers

It’s no secret that criminal hackers are operating from all over the world, able to break into companies remotely via the Internet. As a prudent company owner, you are aware of the risks of criminal hackers.

You’ll want to take necessary steps to keep them from penetrating your network, to protect yourself from the online embarrassment that can come when secrets are revealed.

Use an Up-to-Date Firewall

No modern business can expect to connect to the internet safely without having a firewall in place. If you’ve been using the same firewall configuration installed by IT professionals years ago and haven’t upgraded it since, it’s safe to assume it’s well past time for an update.

With a strong firewall, it’s harder for hackers to penetrate your network. They won’t be able to eavesdrop on what your workers are typing on their computers and smartphones. This is essential for avoiding identity theft. A criminal can make money by draining bank accounts of unsuspecting employees in a blink of an eye.

Of course, the firewall protects company secrets too. Hackers will try to send emails to your employees, hoping someone will click on a link that takes them to a website that installs malware on the worker’s computer. From this point, the hacker can jump onto your servers and start stealing information.

cybersecurity myths going around is that hackers don’t target small and medium-sized enterprises. Nothing could be further from the truth. About 74 percent of SMEs have reported hackers breaching their security. The last thing you would want is for your organization to become another of these statistics.

This is why you must impress upon your employees the importance of following security best practices. They need to change their passwords periodically, using a combination of upper and lower case alphanumeric characters.

Taking the first letter of each word of a phrase is an easy way to make a memorable password that hackers will find difficult to guess. Remind employees not to write their password on a sticky note attached to their computer monitor, a common security error.

Back Up Data Regularly and Store it in Multiple Locations

Think about how you would respond today if hackers threaten your company. Ransomware attacks are common these days, where hackers threaten to delete your data unless you pay them off in untraceable cryptocurrency.

But if you make backups regularly and store them in multiple offsite locations (using a cloud services provider), you can restore your files from this saved data and ignore the hackers.

private in your enterprise is to make it difficult for hackers to gain physical access to your business. Criminal hackers will pose as delivery people. As they wander the hallways, they keep an eye out for passwords on people’s desks and open connections at unattended computers.

If a hacker can’t manage to swipe a computer, they might at the very least steal the user’s login credentials. The answer to this problem is to have visitors check in with security and then escort them to their appointments, rather than allowing strangers to roam freely.

Keeping Your Company Safe

The fact that you’re reading this article on staying safe from hackers indicates you want to do what’s necessary to protect your business and the information you store on employees and customers. To learn more about protecting your company from criminal hackers, please connect with us today.