How to protect your online startup against hacking? Today more businesses live on the internet than ever before. This requires extra measures and defenses to protect your business against hacking. Let’s go over why you should invest in cybersecurity. Also actions you can take today to improve your security posture.
- Maintaining Customers’ Trust: In the 21st-century data is worth a lot. Companies have a lot of sensitive customer and employee data stored on their servers. Which may contain sensitive information. Protecting your data is essential. Failing to protect your data could lead to a permanent loss in customers’ trust.
- Avoiding Financial Loss: Hacking can lead to deep financial loss. A hacker can attack the company’s tools and resources reducing the companies productivity. Also, the attacker can use company resources for his own good. Leading to an inflated bill on the cost of operations. Finally, you can lose sales due to the loss of customer confidence and trust in your services.
Important Note: It becomes hard to recover from the loss of trust due to a data breach. Taking security measures early is the best option to protect your business. Find below the top 5 tips you can do with a ready to use Action List to start today!
Top 5 ways to protect your online startup from hacking:
Principle of least privilege (PolP):
This means to limit the access rights for users to the bare minimum. If your business has different user groups (employees) with different roles. You do not need to provide everyone with access to everything. Give each employee the least possible privilege to perform their legitimate roles. If an attacker gains unauthorized access to one of your user’s account. The attacker does not gain access to the whole system, bt a smaller part of the system and its sensitive data. Hence reducing the risk.
Your Action List:
- Define your user groups and roles within your team’s structure.
- Review all the permissions for each user group to perform their work.
- Provide minimum access to each user group based on their roles.
Review all your tools routinely:
Make it a routine to review all the tools and 3rd party software you use. Make sure it is safe to use and that all your tools are maintained by a trustworthy source/provider. You must always make sure all your software is updated to their latest version.
Your Action List:
- Review all the tools and 3rd party software you use. Make sure they are all safe to use with no know breaches or vulnerabilities.
- Update all your tools to their latest versions.
- Set a routine to do this activity every month. Even better automate the process.
Create a strong password policy:
Needless to say, you need to have a strong password policy within your organization. Although it is an obvious point many people tend to play down its importance. Hackers today have access to tools that make cracking a password an easy task.
Your Action List:
- Make sure passwords are strong and are never written down.
- Never share your password with anyone.
- Make sure to have a unique password for every service.
- Change your password frequently. Even better set them to expire on their own.
- Enable 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) everywhere.
Backup your data frequently:
Create frequent backups of your data. Even though you may have taken all the precautions to avoid getting hacked. Not backing up your data frequently creates a huge risk for your service. Backups allow you to restore your services and recover from any data loss fast.
Your Action List:
- Frequently backup your data online and offline.
- Make sure your backups are usable.
Train your team:
Train your team about cybersecurity while we can take many steps to make sure the system is secure. Yet, the human factor remains the weakest link in your cybersecurity efforts. Ensure the whole team is aware of the possible security threats. Also, train them on how to tackle each threat securely and effectively.
Your Action List:
- Hold frequent cybersecurity awareness sessions for your team and yourself.
That would be all. I hope this article helps you improve your business security posture. Taking action today from the tips and action list defined above is a good first step. Securing your online startup is a continuous effort that you must pursue vigorously. Take action today do not wait till it’s too late to protect your online business.
If you have any feedback or questions feel free to send me right away. ❤️
