Member Article

Six Steps to help Businesses avoid Cyber Crime

In 2014, 60% of small businesses experienced a cyber breach. The average cost of these breach’s range from £65,000 - £115,000, whilst on a national scale the cost was estimated at around £1.7Bn. Here are my 6 steps to help your business avoid Cyber Crime and becoming part of these figures.

1. Utilise a firewall to stop potential threats before they enter the business. Your Internet connection will be scanned by criminals regularly and if any weaknesses are found, they could be exploited.

2. Businesses must ensure that they have Anti Virus installed on every machine and that they are updated regularly. If possible, your Anti Virus program should also include a firewall and threat monitoring tool.

3. Make sure that you pay for a quality spam filter to ensure that only genuine emails reach your business. Once a SPAM email is in your business, it’s too late. Even the most tech savvy employee can click on something in error and give away important financial information or allow a virus to enter the network.

4. Educate your staff to the potential threats so that they are less likely to become victims themselves. Training course - www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/sme

5. Improve your company policies and procedures to ensure that criminals cannot exploit your internal systems. It cannot be right that a simple email from the boss to the admin person could result in a payment. What if the request is from the criminals?

6. Create regular encrypted backups which are stored in the cloud. If all else fails, at least you can revert back to copies of your company data.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Agile Group .