How to Protect Your Business Online During the COVID-19 Pandemic
What is happening?
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led most businesses to resort to the use of the internet for their operations and transactions. Staff members of these organizations have resorted to working remotely from their homes as well as actively employing the use of e-commerce for transactions.
While nothing has changed about the use of e-commerce and e-business, its increased usage in recent times has made it a potential target for hackers. Hackers are aware of the increased usage in the IT environment and are quickly taking advantage of these massive changes.
How do I protect my business?
There are fundamental steps every business organization must take to protect their businesses online.
Step One:
Upgrade security penetration testing and audits on your e-commerce site.
Penetration testing can identify configuration flaws, vulnerabilities, issues specific to e-commerce design, platform weaknesses, or any third-party security issues that can be easily exploited without much effort. Having this in check will not only serve as a security audit but also as a means to set specific metrics against any attacks.
Additionally, best practices such as software security patch updates and multifactor authentication must be implemented.
Step Two:
Align with trusted security professionals who devote their full time and attention to the cybersecurity of your business.
It’s worth noting that not all systems were designed and built for remote works. Thus, some systems may lack certain built-in data protection protocols. Also, an organization or a company’s inability to adequately address cybersecurity for their business moved to online may suffer a great deal of loss since hackers may feed on this advantage to the detriment of the business.
Aligning with cybersecurity professionals will make them fully responsible for protecting the business. They will prevent any form of data breaches and monitoring as they deploy their skills adequately to fight off any attacks.
Step Three:
Educating new remote users
New remote users are a big threat vector. This is because hackers penetrate and break into systems through the flaws of users. They wait patiently for users to commit an error and through that, they make their way into the system placing malware that collects sensitive data from the business.
Hackers are opportunists, attacking a system directly may take a long while to compromise but much easier when done through users of that system. Hence making new remote users a juicy threat vector.
System users should, therefore, be trained as to what:
- Phishing attacks look like.
- How sensitive data should be handled.
- How to skeptically examine links, attachments, fake sites, and spoof senders.
- And lastly, learn to verify the validity of all current system users.
Step 4:
Software as a system is a preferred choice.
The rampant rise of cybercrime during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has undoubtedly increased the demand for cybersecurity for all businesses online. This, however, has led to the surge in cost for such resources making it out of reach for most businesses. Opting for a SaaS, however, is an ideal preference for companies and organizations.
- Start by selecting providers that offer world-class protections in retail.
- Engage in business continuity planning.
- And regularly conduct security reviews for SaaS partner activities.
Security in these times can not be overlooked, make it your priority.
Written by Emmanuella Shika Tetteh.