October is Cyber Security Awareness Month and Australian businesses of all sizes need to take the necessary steps to protect themselves and their businesses from attack.
I have listed my top tips to help businesses create a baseline and protect their IT infrastructure.
Tip 1. Activate Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
It is crucial to enable MFA wherever possible. This is not just about your business accounts but also look to your bank and social media accounts, online payment gateways (PayPal) etc. Learn more about MFA by clicking here about MFA.
Tip 2. Keep your application and infrastructure up-to-date
Another important step is to make sure your hardware and software are up-to-date by ensuring the latest versions of firmware and or patches have been applied. As an example, Microsoft releases updates and patches every month to remediate the application or kill off product and platform security bugs. Other providers with similar patching cycles include Palo Alto, Trend Micro, etc.
Tip 3. Regularly backup your systems
Do you have a disaster recovery plan? All businesses should have a robust and constant backup strategy that includes applications, data and infrastructure. This safeguards in case of disaster including ransomware attacks, intentional or nu-intentional malicious activities from insiders and or location-based disasters.
Tip 4. Secure your remote workforce:
With the spread of COVID-19 throughout the world, millions of people have moved to remote working environments. Enabling a team to work remotely is an ongoing challenge that looks different for every organisation, depending on their size, industry and stage of digital transformation. Therefore, the business must protect identities, endpoints, applications and data even while users are no longer sitting behind office security controls (e.g. firewalls)
Tip 5. Train staff on how to recognise and deal with cybersecurity threats
Most of your employees are frequently exposed to sophisticated social engineering and phishing attacks. Businesses should consider a comprehensive approach to effectively manage this problem, educate employees on what the latest attack methods look like and how to recognise a potential attack.
Cyber attackers are getting more sophisticated and are combining different methods to compromise an organisation’s environment and gain unauthorised access to critical assets. Businesses should seek professional security solutions that defend their environment against sophisticated threats. Talk to Byte to find out how to protect your business from cyber criminals.
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