Cybersecurity For Your Business And Understanding What Your Vulnerabilities Are

Once connected to the internet, there is no saying how and when you'll be the next victim. Whatever your method is, there is always a flaw that could be compromised sooner or later.

There are many groups of hackers that are active in cybercrime. They're are either fighting to "free humanity and speech", rebel against something they dislike, or just doing what they do best. Hackers can come from different countries and demography: from a single fighter doing things he thinks is right to teenagers living in their parents' home.

But what is most damaging, are attacks that typically work under organized crime rings, or state-sponsored attacks. These people usually have darker and more sinister plans. With powerful entities behind their backs, they have much more power to do harm if they wanted to.

Hackers have cost a lot of damages to the global economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars and increasing. And as for companies, they can lost millions of dollars in a single attack.

Millions of dollars is a huge sum of money, and indeed is a lot of damage for any business to handle. The lost is not only from the cost for repairs and the lost of data, or anything that the hackers did to the system. More cost come from the potential future breaches and the lost of trust from the business' customers.

Protection is vital, especially when the internet is now widely used.

So what can businesses do to protect themselves from these attacks. How can they know what and when the attack will be, and how can they prevent them from happening?

Cybersecurity

To prevent the bad things from happening, businesses must first know their weakest link.

No matter how powerful their systems are or how sophisticated their security is in preventing any unwanted attacks, humans are the greatest security risk to any business and system application. Humans that are involved in a business' activity, including employees and users, they are all the weak links in security.

To prevent breaches internally, many companies have trained their employees and updated their policies. Externally, companies have forced users to change password, informing them of potential attacks and making them go through the troubles of multiple authentication process.

However, hackers can still find their ways around the subject. So just using common sense may not be enough to keep them away.

They have become better and increasingly active in sending phishing email scams, social engineering and even other techniques to get out to people's weaknesses. And with many people now knowing how hackers work, hackers aren't that worried: it only takes one single successful attack to create a clear path for many future attacks.

So whatever a company did to protect itself, never assume that everything is secured. There is always a hole that is yet to be seen, and it's either that business or the hackers that will find it first.

Hacker

What businesses should do is to adapt to the changes. Time will describe what will be the future needs and trends.

It's almost impossible to build a system with no vulnerability. Instead of putting all efforts to secure that system, it's advisable to invest in understanding what potential vulnerabilities are, and try to develop security measures and detection infrastructure accordingly.

So rather than wasting resources on trying to build an unwieldy, unusable, yet incredibly secure system, businesses need to focus on building a system that is both secure and highly usable. Here, businesses need to think like a hacker.

Hackers may like challenges. But when time, reputation and credibility are at stake, they tend to find an easy way to do what they want to do. Imagine that we have a barred front door and an unlocked back window. A robber that realizes both, will choose to enter through the unlocked back window, saving him the troubles.

If thinking like hackers isn't a business' cup of tea, they may want to hire hackers and have them hack the system. These hackers are considered to be ethical hackers, and are usually made up of security consultants who are paid for hire to test the security of a company.

While this strategy may not be received easy by businesses, the key for this is to test a system from a hacker's point of view. Not just from an IT professionals point of view.

Padlock data

Keeping up with the trends and needs, should come in line with staying ahead with the competition, and keeping ahead of potential hacker attacks. Research and development is crucial to any success of any strategy.

So no matter what the size of your business is, or in what industry you're on, security should always be a priority, especially when it comes to protecting customers' data that they've trusted to you, and to secure all
your assets from not going to the wrong hands.

Your best chances to win against hackers aren't limited to creating a good system, but to continue to build your security. Invest in time and resources in finding and understanding where your vulnerabilities lie, and patch them as soon as they're discovered. If you don't, something will come through it, and always expect that thing to be unfriendly.

Related: Closing the Doors from Online Threat for Your Small Business