Hacks and Attacks

1. Education. The most effective precaution against hackers and potential breaches, is to educate yourself and your employees. Most attacks can be avoided or countered simply by recognising the threat, be it an email, website or suspicious phone call. Even the most sophisticated security networks can be undone from within by the careless opening of an email or USB stick.

2. 3rd Party Vendors. Part of securing your business requires knowing exactly who has access to it. Do your suppliers or vendors have good security and privacy policies? If they were to be compromised, would you be next?

3. Protect your data. Understand what your most important data is and secure it safely. With a rise in unprotected individual devices, simply creating a security network parameter may not be enough. Identify your important data, isolate it, secure it and back it up.

4. Limit access. Ensure that sensitive data and important information is stored sparingly. For example, with a network containing credit card information, ensure this information only exists on machines that require it, rather than across the whole network. Similarly, limit access to that data to only those users that require it.

5. Monitor usage. Make sure you are able to monitor who is using your network and what they are using it for. Remote access by an existing user that never works from home should be investigated. Make sure any unusual behaviour is noticed, reported and investigated. Monitoring in such a way will often prevent major attacks from occurring or diminish the damage from an attack which is caught at the early stages.