Every day in the UK there are 65,000 attempts to hack small to medium sized businesses. Of these attempts 4,500 of them are successful. Although that doesn’t seem like a massive number of successes (6.9%) considering the average cost of a breach in the UK is £3.2m it is quite lucrative for the hackers.[1]
As businesses’ IT security gets more robust, the hackers up their game and work out how to breach any vulnerabilities within the software, hardware and security systems. They are not giving up, so it is essential that small to medium businesses don’t give up either when it comes to protecting IT.
There are some really simple ways to protect your IT from the risk of cyber-attacks. And whilst some of you may be rolling your eyes saying, ‘I know this’, ask yourself how many of them you actually implement in your business
- Two Factor Authentication – A password alone isn’t enough (especially if they can be cracked in seconds) to protect you against hackers. Two-factor authentication requires your username and password as well as a random code, additional pin or a fingerprint for access. This means even if the hackers have the password they still can’t gain access to your devices.
- System Updates – It is essential to ensure all system updates are carried out regularly as these will fix any known vulnerabilities and glitches in the software. This will keep you one step ahead of the hackers, who use these vulnerabilities to gain access to your systems.
- System back-ups – By doing regular backups of all your systems, and more importantly storing them on different servers to your working systems will ensure that should a breach happen then you will be able to restore your data to the last backup.
- Passwords – Passwords should be complex with approximately 10 characters, which are a combination of upper and lower case as well as characters and numbers. In2019 23.2 million breach victims were using 123456 as the password which would take the hackers less than one second to breach. So, the key here is ‘complex’. A random collection of letters and numbers will take significantly longer to breach and will protect your systems. Additionally, it’s important to have a different password for every application and site
- Anti-virus and anti-malware software – Loading anti-virus and anti-malware software onto all your systems and ensuring it is regularly updated will prevent known viruses and malware from being loaded onto your systems. And with malware and ransomware attacks on the rise, with an increase of 139% between 2019 and 2020 the only way to stay one step ahead of the hackers is to have up to date robust anti-malware and anti-virus software.
- Secure Wi-Fi – With more people working remotely this has never been more important. No data should be sent over unsecured Wi-Fi. That means Wi-Fi in public libraries or coffee shops or Wi-Fi hot spots with no password requirement, could be leaving all your information open for anyone to access.
- Principle of Least Privilege – In any sized organisation, only giving people access rights to the things they need to complete their jobs will ensure if they are hacked, the hackers have limited access as well. They generally only have the same access to whatever the user has on the device they have hacked into.
By implementing all of these into your IT processes will improve your IT security greatly. However, it needs to be considered that IT security is not ‘one and done’ but an ongoing process.
If you would like to check that your IT systems are secure from cybercriminals but don’t know where to start, the team at SupportWise today for a no-obligation chat.
[1] https://techjury.net/blog/how-many-cyber-attacks-per-day/#gref