5 basic practices that can protect your organisation from a Cyber Attack

Jan 8, 2020 | Ruah Cyber Security

Last year, 1 in 10 Aussie businesses suffered IT breaches. There were 89,856 incidents reported.

  • 6% from wholesale trade
  • 5% from manufacturing
  • 9% from rental, hiring & real estate
  • 6% from professional, scientific & technical services
  • 3% from IT & media.

For businesses that did report a breach or incident, downtime was the most common impact of the breach or incident at 52 percent followed by corruption or loss of data at 28.7 percent.

Websites form an integral component of every business serving as the area of reception in the digital realm holding basic contact info, CRM & email integrations. In the case of an E-commerce website tons of product and customer data. Henceforth it is an absolute necessity to find out vulnerabilities and address them.

Here are some best practices to protect your business from hackers on the prowl:

  1. Update passwords every 3 months: Most company policies require requires staff and faculty to change passwords every 120 days as 80% of all cybersecurity attack involve a weak or stolen password. Changing your password regularly reduces your risk of exposure and avoids a number of dangers.
  2. Frame a cybersecurity policy and inform your team to comply: A Cybersecurity policy would address on password changing, opening suspicious emails and installing unauthorized applications on the work devices and networks.
  3. Network Access Control & Access Levels: involves restricting the availability of network resources to endpoint devices that comply with your security policy. Whereas, Access control is giving users the least amount of access they need to do their jobs. This ensures that the hacker doesn’t get access to the entire network when an individual’s password or device is compromised.
  4. Firewall: One of the first lines of defense in a cyber-attack is a firewall, it is advised that employees working from home install a firewall on their home network as well.
  5. Website Audit: As mentioned earlier, websites not only serve as an area of reception but also hold key user information. A cybersecurity attack on a website usually involves data loss, downtime and injection of ad malware scripts.