Cybersecurity Awareness Month was started by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in October 2004 as a push to educate and help all internet users to stay safe and learn how to be more secure online. Cyber Security is constantly becoming more and more of a problem.
October is Cyber Security Awareness Month – What Can My Business Do?
This short blog post focuses on malware and how to protect your business against malware. We have many other articles about other things you can do to protect yourself against cyber security breaches. Malware is a broad term people use that describes malicious software that can include many different things including adware, viruses, trojans, ransomware, exploits and key loggers. So, we’re not going to bore you with all the details of the differences of what those are. We will be coming out with more content about each of these items specifically. If you want more information about each individual type of malicious activity you can watch our YouTube Playlist Here. We will go over what your business should be doing to protect against these threats.
You should make sure you have a good firewall in place with all security features enabled. But as we have discussed in other videos. Sometimes a good or expensive firewall isn’t enough. Phishing and Bad Actors have other ways of getting past that Firewall you can read more on that here. Another thing to have enabled and on each machine in the office is some sort of antivirus. Going back to Phishing emails, good user practices your users should be trained. Training not just in email security but also how to look out for other malicious activity and making team members aware of pop-ups on them machines suspicious activity and be reporting that to your IT department. You should also have web filtering in place not just from a productivity standpoint but to potentially block dangerous or malicious websites before an employee can accidentally click on one. By far the most important thing we recommend is having a good backup and disaster recovery plan in place. Including business continuity so the difference between those two things are everyone at this point should have some sort of backup in place where it’s copying data off your server to some external device but the second point of this is your business continuity plan that is your plan for a business to have one of these malicious pieces of software overtakes your network you need to have in place what actual steps you’re going to take to get your business back online and functioning.
People in IT tend to take cyber security very seriously. Networks and computing can be a very safe process if you take the necessary steps to ensure your team, workstations, and networks are secure. It is always brought up as an important key part of maintaining a business. Many people think they don’t need the protection or the business they are in isn’t big enough to need to be protected. Cyber Security Awareness Month is for you!