Many people are used to thinking about cyber crime as a rare event that happens to other people or companies who are far away. The truth is that cyber crime is on the rise, and advances in technology may make cyber crime more common as the years go by.
Studies show that cyber crime is more and more about financial gain and that it affects millions of people. The risk of a security breach will keep going up as tech advances.
At some point, so many companies will suffer that it will become common practice to use better security practices. However, it is best to avoid becoming one of the companies that acts as an example of why it is important to have strong managed IT security services.
So how can you minimize the chance of suffering a data breach?
Read on to learn all about the most powerful techniques to keep your data safe!
Train Employees and Business Leaders
Some companies rely only on software tools and security companies to keep them safe. The reality is that every person in your company is a potential security vulnerability.
Left to their own devices, people will naturally engage in normal activities that can make them susceptible to cybercrime. That can then allow cyber criminals access to company data. Invest in training your employees and leaders.
Update Your Password Policy
One of the most important things for everyone to understand is how to create a safe password. This is even more important because most people have mistaken ideas about how to make a password safe.
Does this sound familiar?
Safe passwords are the result of combining complicated sequences of uppercase and lowercase letters with random extra symbols and numbers.
The truth is, this kind of password does next to nothing to prevent data breaches. In fact, it can even make you more vulnerable to data breaches.
People who use passwords like this give up on remembering them. Instead, they rely on writing them down or staying logged in to everything all of the time. That security weakness is even more tragic because it is unnecessary.
Proper password practices allow you to create impenetrable passwords that are easy to remember. How is this possible? The real thing that makes a password secure is that it is long, not that it is complicated.
That is because cyber criminals do not guess passwords to break into systems. Instead, they use systems that guess as many possible passwords as possible as fast as possible. The longer a password is, the harder it is for these systems to figure it out.
And the effect can be astounding. Adding a few extra characters to a password can make it thousands or even millions of times harder for brute force systems to guess.
But if a password is longer, won’t it be hard for people to remember? In fact, long passwords can consist of simple phrases that are easy to remember. A password like elephantsandgiraffes is easy to remember, but extremely difficult for a brute force system to guess.
It is also important to avoid the most common passwords.
Use Lockouts for Extra Security
We already talked about brute force systems that try to guess passwords. The existence of these kinds of criminal tools is why lockout practices exist. These practices limit the number of times people can enter a password within a certain amount of time.
Setting up these kinds of practices that your company will protect you from many cyber criminal techniques.
Update Your Business IT Services and Security Tools to Prevent Cyber Risks
Companies acquire a long list of software tools to help them operate. Each of these tools is a potential security vulnerability. However, popular tools are popular because they provide security protections.
At the same time, criminal techniques continue to advance. The protections that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. That is one reason why software tool creators update their tools. They add the latest defenses against the latest criminal techniques.
But you will not enjoy these protections if you do not update your software. Make sure that everyone in your company sets their software tools to update automatically.
Use the Best Data Encryption You Can
Using the best data encryption and authentication practices possible may sound difficult and expensive. The truth is that encryption has reached a stage of incredible sophistication. End-to-end encryption is a tool that is impossible to break as far as anyone knows.
It is simple to use and makes it so that even the systems that pass data from one place to another cannot see that data while they transport it.
Implement Changes Over Time
Some companies make the mistake of updating security practices, announcing them, and then considering their work done. The reality is that people will struggle to implement a list of new practices that they learn about all at the same time.
“The best strategy to achieve compliance with security practices is to instruct employees a little bit at a time,” explains Chad Lauterbach, CEO of BE Structured Technology Group, a leading IT support Los Angeles based company. “Give employees a simple new rule to follow, answer their questions and help them to follow it.”
Make sure you check up to ensure that everyone is following the new security policy. At that point, you can implement another security policy edition.
It is tempting to change security policies in many ways all at the same time. However, that will not get you to safety faster. Instead, it means that many employees will not bother trying to implement every new practice.
Use Cyber Risk Assessments
It is important to test your systems to find out if they have security vulnerabilities. Every so often, look over your system for any vulnerabilities you can find. You may need to hire security experts to run these kinds of cyber risk assessments for you.
Use the Most Effective Techniques to Minimize Your Risk of a Security Breach
The idea of a security breach can be frightening. However, the right safety practices will keep your data and company safe. The more that you understand about the importance of cybersecurity, the better you can appreciate the importance of investing in proper data security practices.
To learn more about how to keep your data safe, feel free to reach out to the leading cyber security companies in Los Angeles and get in touch with Be Structured today!
