Cyber Network Security

 Companies, whether small or large or of any industry, can become a target of a cyber-attack. Thus, businesses must take preventative measures and adopt a serious approach to cyber security to help minimize risk. Efficient cyber resilience can enhance your business’ reputation, its brand image, protect it from losses, and much more. 

Cyber and data security breaches are carried out with malicious intent by attackers. The leading causes of a data breach may be a malicious or criminal attack, a system glitch, or even a human error.

However, businesses and employees need to understand that whatever causes the breach, there is a strong need for cyber resilience, as the ramifications of such cyber attacks and breaches can be broad and very costly...

• Inside attack
• Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS)
• Intellectual property/confidential data theft
• Password attacks
• Phishing
• Unauthorized network access by outsiders/employees
• Virus or malicious software infection
• Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)

 You should have a holistic approach toward cyber resilience. You must implement company-wide security policies that will help reduce the likelihood of an attack. Everyone must be made responsible and accountable for cyber security. You can mandate practices that insist on creating solid passwords a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols) and change them frequently. The organization should also test its processes, procedures, and people regularly. You should also ensure that your company’s security strategy is current and efficient for the business and its risks. 

You should have a properly documented cyber resiliency plan that helps provide a fast response and manages a data breach. This plan should have properly laid out protocols that employees can follow to manage a situation when a breach occurs. The plan should also ensure that employees use proper data breach prevention as well as intrusion detection tools to help identify a breach as soon as it occurs. You should also regularly conduct mock drills to test your resilience plan's efficacy and fine-tune it, if necessary. Such mock drills will also help your employees gain hands-on practice and confidence to detect a breach quickly and contain a breach, if and when it occurs.

    One of the weakest points in most small business networks is the gateway through which your organization connects to the Internet. It is through this weak spot that most viruses can quickly enter the system undetected and wreak havoc. 

Hence, to protect the gateway layer and suppress cyber threats at this level, you should maintain an up-to-date security appliance like a firewall with gateway anti-virus and web content filtering. One common mistake that small and even medium-sized businesses tend to make is installing a broadband connection to their network, like a cable modem, and then connecting their workstations through a Wi-Fi or wired connection. This is the worst possible scenario, lending to no protection at all. Another common mistake is installing a security appliance specially designed for home use, not getting critical updates, and having limitations to its features like intrusion detection and Geoblocking. Small to medium-sized businesses should avoid enlisting help from unqualified family and friends to install and configure firewall equipment at all costs. Cybersecurity is a complex and fluid specialty in information technologies that requires lots of training.