How to Protect Your Small Business from Cybercrime

Hardly a week goes by without mention in the news of a company being hacked. For consumers, this means that their sensitive data really gets around. Since cyber criminals often leave no trace for authorities to go on, victims find themselves with little more to do than blame the business being hacked. The following five methods will help your small business avoid being the next target of cyber criminals.

Take it Offline

Many business owners imagine that all their company records must be stored on computers. In addition, they also like keeping their computers tied to a central network. A security consultant with a Master's degree in criminal justice says cyber criminals can take advantage of this setup—however, the less sensitive data there is on company computers, the less opportunity cyber criminals will have to acquire such data. If a company needs access to electronic records containing such sensitive data, the question becomes how necessary will it be to connect these computers to the Internet. The first step to protecting a small company from a cyber-attack turns out to be to not dangle a sensitive data carrot in the face of cyber criminals in the first place.

Scaling Back a Small Business's Online Use

Another excellent measure to take involves using dedicated computers for certain specific online activities. If a business needs to do online banking from the office, for example, then it works well to dedicate one computer in the office for Internet use. This not only cuts back on the potential for a cyber-attack, but it also keeps company employees from surfing the Internet at work. Once transactions have been completed, the computer being dedicated for online use will not necessarily need to remain online when not in use. Every opportunity taken to disconnect the dedicated computer only serves to add to the level of security of a small business's sensitive data.

Internal Leaks

Anyone can sit around thinking up clever passwords and firewall security measures to protect their small business from cyber-attacks. Although such measures are certainly better than no protection at all, they by no means prevent an internal leak. If an employee hands out their personal password, this opens your system wide up to cyber thieves. For this reason, a small business needs to significantly restrict how much remote access employees have to the company system at any given time. Using monitoring software to monitor an employee’s remote access of company data will often provide the evidence that an employee’s password has been leaked or compromised. In such a case, it will be necessary to confront the employee about the nature of their remote system access habits.

Obscuring Sensitive Data

Some small businesses employ sophisticated encryption algorithms to obscure sensitive data being stored on their company computers. From this perspective, the idea is to protect a small business by making company data useless even if it happens to fall into a hacker's hands. Other companies seed their sensitive data tables with all sorts of misleading data, again making it difficult for hackers to know which information contains genuine value and which does not.

Protecting a small business from cyber-attack will be easiest when company computers and networks are restricted from Internet access. When necessity dictates that a company must operate online, it becomes evident that more creative measures must be taken to keep hackers at bay. Passwords and firewalls provide various levels of authentication and data restriction measures, but a savvy hacker will sometimes circumvent these preventative efforts. This explains why a small business owner must always be ready with a plan to protect their business from attacks by clever cyber criminals.