Locked doors, shutters, CCTV, security guards, remote surveillance – we do all these things to keep our business premises’ safe from intruders, thieves and criminals. It’s our first line of defence against criminals who want to undo all our hard work for their own selfish reasons.
But, did you know that your business is probably more at risk of a cyber attack than a physical one? While some criminals may be enticed by expensive computers, printers and the money in your till, others take a more sophisticated and financially viable approach. The bank details of your clients, credit histories, money and of course information about everyone you’ve ever done business with are much more worthwhile to criminals and easier to access if you’re not taking the right cybersecurity precautions.
Thankfully, programmes such as DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service), can help create a disaster recovery plan that helps you get back to work, recover data and protect your company’s critical systems effectively in the event of an IT disaster.
Is this something you could benefit from? If your business is at risk of a cyber-attack, then it could be an integral part of your IT infrastructure. Here we’ll take a look at the worrying signs that your business is vulnerable to a cyber-attack.
Your passwords are weak and obvious
Passwords are essentially the keys we use to gain entry to our technological lives. You wouldn’t half lock your front door, would you? Having weak passwords is like hiding the key to your house under the front mat. Consider password generators, or a combination of numbers, upper and lowercase numbers and symbols.
These passwords should be changed every three months minimum, and there should be different passwords for different applications and programmes throughout your network. “Password”, your children’s names or your DOB can easily be found by anyone online. Speak with your staff regularly to remind them of the importance of strong passwords.
Your anti-virus software is out of date
Hackers and cybercriminals love a challenge. And finding a way to crack through your company firewall is certainly a task they’ll enjoy. Viruses and malware are created for this exact purpose, and if you don’t keep your own anti-virus and malware protection up to date, then your business is at risk of being infiltrated.
You think it won’t happen to you
Sadly, many small businesses believe that because they’re small, they don’t have the same appeal as big businesses. Surely, thousands of clients and a huge amount of data and information is much more appealing? Right? Regrettably, it’s just not the case.
Many cybercriminals prefer to attack smaller businesses like yours, simply because of this apathetic attitude. If you don’t think it will happen to you, you won’t do anything about it, so there’ll be very little to stop them from devastating your business.
Finally, your systems are slow
Sluggish and slow connections? You could already be experiencing a DoS or denial of service attack. If this sounds familiar, reach out to your IT team or support team as soon as possible.
Susan Paige is an account owned by District Media used for placing articles which are not authored by part of our regular writing team. Susan Paige is representative of the virtues of WordPress publishing on the internet: confidence, quality, speed and commerce.
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