While developers come up with a new way to protect the information, experts note that the risk of becoming a victim of a data breach increases every year. It is like running in a vicious circle – new and new methods of protection give rise to new and new methods of hacking. However, there is another opinion in which experts are unanimous. You can reduce your risks by half if you resolve internal security issues as quickly as possible. In this article, we describe how to do this in three simple steps.
What Is a Data Breach and How to Protect Your Business From It
Data hacking is a situation where all information belonging to a company (or personal information of an individual) is stolen by attackers for the purpose of further resale (to competitors or on the black market), further theft of money (for example, having financial data of company customers or individuals), or with the aim of blackmail and extortion. The latter target is popular among medical data crackers.
In addition, 36% of data hacking cases are the part of the organized crime activities, companies incur tremendous losses ($1.41 million for each hacking event), and 80% of hacking cases involve an unreliable or stolen password.
And here is what you can do to protect your personal and corporate data.
Make Sure Your Employees Know Data Security Rules
This is the most important step you need to take. No innovative data protection methods will help if your employees constantly compromise your data. Especially if they use personal devices for work. Here are some simple rules to help you protect your data. Make sure all your employees know and follow them.
Do not leave personal devices unattended, even if you need to step back for a few minutes. Turn off or securely lock the laptop or smartphone.
Create various, and most importantly, long and difficult to reproduce passwords for all sites that your employees use. Even if you work with several sites from one niche, for example, the Best Writers Online and Online Writers Rating custom writing reviews platforms, each of your employees should have different passwords for accessing each platform.
Use passwords consisting of an arbitrary set of letters, numbers, and special characters. Do not use first names, surnames, dates of birth, names of famous people, and brand names as passwords. Store passwords in a strong password manager.
If your employees often go on business trips with their personal devices, teach them to never leave a laptop at the hotel.
Protect your device and the ones of your staff from physical theft. There are apps that allow you to block the access, encrypt, or delete all the data stored on the laptop remotely if it is stolen.
Make sure your employees know and can identify the main fraudulent strategies such as fishing, spamming, or proxy server fraud. They are the most popular ways that lead to a data security breach in such business spheres as retail and e-commerce.
Use Machine Learning Fraud Prevention Solutions
At the moment, the two most reliable technologies that can protect against both fraud and data hacking are blockchain and machine learning. In addition, they can also be combined to provide almost absolute protection.
Of course, these are quite expensive innovations, but the cost of their development justifies the level of security that they provide. Modern machine-learning data breach solutions can prevent data hacking attempts because they detect anomalies in real-time – that is, before the attempt is completed. The simplest example is an attempt to access data, for example, corporate email from another device or from another time zone. Machine learning algorithms catch this anomaly and send an alarm about a possible attempt.
As for fraud prevention, these solutions also work great to prevent credit card fraud, identity theft, mobile and friendly fraud, and other fraudulent strategies. In addition, the most advanced systems are able to self-learn in the process of work so as to never make the same mistake twice. It is also possible to create a custom solution suitable for any type of business and any task.
Protect You Data Stored in the Cloud
93% of American businesses are now using clouds to store their data. This is a really convenient approach that saves the amount of memory needed, does not require expensive equipment, and even allows you to save money and make your business more environmentally friendly. Moreover, issues of security and data safety are the responsibility of the cloud provider. Choosing a reliable provider is already half the guarantee that your data will be safe.
However, you can strengthen this protection even further by taking a few simple steps. As a rule, cloud providers easily customize their services – that is, you can choose additional services that your company needs. For example, you can encrypt sensitive data to provide strong protection.
In addition, it always makes sense to have a response strategy in case the cloud server gets hacked. All reliable providers always copy the information of their customers, but the business still loses money until all the consequences are eliminated on the side of the provider. Therefore, you also need a personal response strategy that will allow the business to continue working while the cloud provider deals with the hack.
Conclusion
As you can see, it is not so difficult to protect your data. But unfortunately, most ordinary people as well as business owners are careless. Most of us think this can happen to anyone, but not to us. However, large data hacks, for example, resonant cases with Facebook and Friend Finder Network, prove that even a famous name is not immunity. This is the case when each company must take care of the safety of its data on its own. And you already know what you can do right now.
About the author: Frank Hamilton is a blogger and translator from Manchester. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.
