16 Tips to Protect your Business from Cyber Attacks

1. Understand the evolving risk: It is important to be vigilant of the different forms of how hackers scheme their way in and access your confidential files.
2. Educate your employees about cybersecurity: It is necessary to educate your employees about the importance of cybersecurity not only for the business but for them as well, on a personal level.
3. Secure your laptops, PCs, and mobile devices: Devices should be secured or restricted form downloading applications or files that are irrelevant for work and eventually posing harm to your business.
4. Backup your files regularly: Backup your files to an external hard drive or cloud server in order to avoid compromising important data that are essential to your company
5. Establish strong passwords: Creating a strong password is very important since it is a requirement for a certain file to be accessed and restricts any unwanted accessors.
6. Establish a strong firewall: Having a strong firewall that can protect your network’s security; by controlling the traffic entering and going out of your business.
7. Use anti-virus and anti-malware software: In case you may have accessed a website that contains harmful viruses or have downloaded a file with malwares, installing anti-virus and anti-malware software could prevent entry or resolve issues with these contaminants.
8. Use a virtual private network (vpn) or cloud: VPN benefits users by ensuring an appropriate level of security by providing privacy in your network. However, a cloud is an online form of storage for files and media.
9. Keep your programs and software up to date: Make sure that programs and softwares installed in laptops or desktops are updated because of the added security features such as bug fixes and others, plus outdated programs and softwares can be a gateway for threats such as hackers and unwanted accessors.
10. Thoroughly monitor your network system: Have an IT experts monitor your network system in order to identify lurking threats and restrict their access in your network, also to prevent leakage of confidential information externally.
11. Creation and implementation of a security policy: Incorporating a security in your business’ standard operating procedures could be one of the best defense that you may have against cyber attacks.
12. Update your clients agreements: Businesses will always have clients’ information that should be treated with confidentiality. Precautionary measures must be in place to protect your business from loss of data through cyber attacks.  It is important to incorporate cyber security clauses in your client agreements as transfer of data is inevitable.
13. Update your websites terms of use and disclaimer: Your website’s terms of use and disclaimer must be placed in an area that is accessible for websites viewers like in the bottom part of your homepage. These and other privacy policies protect your business so make sure your content covers cyber attacks, electronic communication breaches, ransom wares and hacked links. Consult a lawyer in creation of these documents.
14. Review your privacy policy: The impact of having a privacy policy is for transparency to clients in the use and protection of the information gathered.
15. Prepare and execute an incident response plan: In the time of breach, it is important that your employees know exactly what to do instead of panicking.
16. Learn from the mistakes of others: Be familiar with the cyberattacks that happened to other businesses and access your internal situation by determining what went wrong and comparing it internally to prevent the same thing from happening to your business.