3 Powerful Strategies To Protect Your Business Against Cyber Crime

A cyberattack happens every 39 seconds. What’s even more shocking is that 43% of all cyberattacks target small businesses.

Small businesses, with their makeshift IT teams, are easy targets for hackers. Large enterprises, despite having tougher IT infrastructure to breach, make for highly rewarding targets. So, no business is 100% immune to cyberattacks. However, you can take several steps to make it more difficult for hackers to breach your systems, reduce their ROI from hacking your business, and thereby discourage them.

On top of it, you must also take steps to protect your business from the inevitable loss of customer trust, goodwill, and business revenue.

Here are 3 steps you can take now to protect your business against the cyberattacks and the damage they leave in their wake.

1. Prepare Your People

Did you know what 95% of all cyber breaches occur due to human error?

The bulk of these breaches could be avoided merely by training your staff to identify threats, and respond to them. Phishing and social engineering attacks have become increasingly common modes of cyberattacks.

Infected emails, infected documents, baiting, pretexting, whaling, tailgating, and the list of social engineering attacks keeps growing. Luckily, it’s easy to recognize these attacks with some training. By making your staff aware of these attacks, you can better equip them to deal with them.

2. A Robust IT Team

An IT team with security expertise can establish necessary security infrastructure and best practices to protect the business against common threats. They can also take a proactive approach to secure your data, devices, and software against emerging threats.

If you are a small business or a startup, then you may not have a dedicated team. In that case, here are some measures you can take to improve your business’ cybersecurity posture:

• Use a powerful antivirus software

• Train your employees to keep all their software updated. This includes their OS, digital tools, mobile apps, and so on.

• Install robust firewalls on all devices and across your corporate network

3. Buy Cyber Liability Insurance

Cyber liability insurance is a relatively new product in the insurance industry. For this reason, there’s little awareness about it even among businesses.

A good cyber liability insurance offers protection against the following:

• Business Interruption coverage

• Forensic data recovery coverage

• Ransomware coverage

• Notification cost coverage

• Broad Defenition of Computer

• Provide preventative tools to avoid falling victim to cyber crime.

Most cyber liability products out there offer limited coverage against cyberattacks and leave the businesses out to dry when they need help the most. With the average breach notification costing businesses over $100,000, they need robust coverage against a universal threat and a growing reality.  The best coverage is separate policy with its own terms and definitions, and a stopgap measure against catastrophic loss, this means that the coverage that’s “included” as an add on to your General Liability (CGL) or Business Owners Policy (BOP) is not likely anywhere near enough to really help after even a modest cyber incident.