Cyber attacks are a serious threat to any workplace that relies on digital technology. Hackers can steal sensitive data, disrupt operations, damage reputation, and cause financial losses. To protect your business and employees, you need to take proactive steps to prevent cyber attacks in the workplace. Here are some tips to help you do that.
One of the easiest ways to prevent cyber attacks is to keep your software updated. Software updates often include security patches that fix vulnerabilities and bugs that hackers can exploit. You should update your operating system, applications, browsers, and antivirus software regularly. You can also enable automatic updates or use a software management tool to simplify the process.
Assign a responsible role for overseeing the organization's security systems and tools. This role can be fulfilled by a support service within the IT department, a dedicated system administrator, or an outsourcing company. Based on my experience in managing and supporting outsourced IT systems, the most effective approach involves a combination of two processes: 24/7 infrastructure monitoring, which tracks all incidents, and dedicated specialists who regularly monitor and maintain key indicators of the IT infrastructure (such as disk space, availability of updates, database management, etc.).
Another key factor to prevent cyber attacks is to educate your staff on cyber security best practices. Your staff should be aware of the common types of cyber attacks, such as phishing, ransomware, malware, and denial-of-service. They should also know how to spot and report suspicious emails, links, attachments, and pop-ups. You can provide regular training, newsletters, quizzes, and reminders to your staff to reinforce cyber security awareness.
A weak password can be easily cracked by hackers and give them access to your accounts and data. To prevent cyber attacks, you should use strong passwords that are long, complex, and unique. You should also change your passwords frequently and avoid using the same password for multiple accounts. You can use a password manager or a passphrase generator to create and store strong passwords.
Encryption is a process that scrambles your data into an unreadable format that can only be decoded with a key. Encryption can protect your data from unauthorized access, even if hackers manage to breach your network or device. You should encrypt your data both in transit and at rest, meaning when you send or receive it and when you store it. You can use encryption tools, such as VPNs, SSL certificates, and encryption software, to encrypt your data.
Backing up your data is a crucial step to prevent cyber attacks from causing irreversible damage. Backing up your data means making copies of your files and storing them in a separate location, such as an external hard drive, a cloud service, or a remote server. Backing up your data can help you recover from data loss, corruption, or deletion caused by cyber attacks. You should backup your data regularly and test your backups to ensure they work.
A common mistake observed among IT directors or engineers responsible for an organization's IT infrastructure is the practice of storing backup copies on the same servers as the primary data. It is imperative to highlight the significance of placing backup copies on a separate server, preferably located in another data center or a distinct geographic zone (when dealing with tier 1 capacity providers) By adopting this strategy, organizations enhance their resilience against potential risks such as server failures, disasters, targeted or non-targeter cyber attacks. The separation of primary data and backup copies provides a robust contingency plan in the event of a larger-scale disruption.
Finally, to prevent cyber attacks, you should implement policies and procedures that define and enforce cyber security standards in your workplace. Policies and procedures can cover topics such as acceptable use, access control, incident response, disaster recovery, and compliance. Policies and procedures can help you establish roles and responsibilities, set expectations and rules, monitor and audit activities, and respond to and recover from cyber attacks.
While creating policies is crucial, but the key lies in the details. Based on working experience with fintech, healthcare, e-government, and enterprises it's important to implement regular policy check-up. I mean continious process and review of your IT landscape. It is essential to regularly review and update access and rights policies. This includes: - meticulous attention to detail in managing user permissions, - adopting that employees have the necessary access required for their roles while promptly revoking access for those who no longer need it. Many data leaks and intentional attacks stem from inadequate control and irregular updating of access rights and policies.
Of course implement cybersecurity tools into your organisation IT landscape. Use cybersecurity tools such as VPN-gate (for remote workplaces), NGFW (Next Generation Firewall) SWG (security web gateway). VPN-gate could help you to protect from external penetration. We highly recommend to use it for remote workplaces. SWG or NGFW help to filter input and output traffic from threats. For organisation who are taken care about corporate data's and who works with personal data and financial data it's highly important to use DPI into infrastructure. DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) is able to detect a few kinds of buffer overflow attacks. DPI may be used by enterprise for Data Leak Prevention