How to Protect Your Business from Future Cyber Attacks

The threat coming from cyber-attacks is from individual hackers, hacking groups and foreign countries. Collectively, they engage hackers to attempt to steal proprietary information, company secrets, personal details about staff, and useful files from company servers. Many FTSE 100 companies have been subject to hacks and have lost customer records, resulting in the loss of confidence from their customers.

It’s important that companies take the security threat seriously and do whatever they can to protect against it. Here are a few ways to secure different types of company assets.

Ensuring Web Apps & Private Clouds Are Protected

Some web apps provide a crucial resource to aid workers in the field at a disaster site, help keep staff organised through a difficult start-up phase or simply connect users to their data in a useful way. Any loss of access to data and functionality is a major issue for companies that use their web app as a major marketing arm or simply to provide the service to their customers.

A security package like F5 BIG-IP is a dependable firewall designed to protect private clouds, virtual environments used by workers, and web apps available online. Knowing how to configure F5 big IP correctly to provide the greatest security benefit to avoid network intrusions, DDoS attacks, and to shape web traffic during peak periods is key. The package is complex enough that staff must be properly trained to not only configure the software correctly, but also to get the highest level of security from this powerful firewall software.

Locking Business Devices When Not in Use

It depends whether employees use mobile devices like the Apple iPhone, iPad, or an Android system and if they have fingerprint security enabled. While fingerprint scanners in handheld devices can be thwarted, it’s still quite effective when it’s used properly. Employees who access the company’s intranet from their devices need to be made aware of the requirement to lock their device at all times when it’s not being actively used and to log out of the company servers once their actions are complete.

It’s still fairly common that people do not lock their mobile devices. This makes it easy for thieves to get right into their personal and business data when the device is stolen when it’s already unlocked. The thief has carte blanche to do whatever they want with the data and attempt to access apps and websites that the device is already logged into. Getting out of the habit takes time, but reducing the time-out allowance before automatically logging people out of the company intranet is a good thing to do in the meantime.

Virtual Private Network

A virtual private network (VPN) creates an encrypted tunnel to communicate across the internet. Data is scrambled so it’s unreadable on the client machine, sent encrypted across the internet using a VPN service, and then only decrypted once the data reaches a safe VPN server on the other side. For employees wanting to access their company’s intranet from outside the office (or halfway around the world for that matter), it’s a safer way to do so.

Bear in mind that unless the company chooses to setup their own VPN service internally, they’ll have to rely on purchasing a public VPN service like CyberGhost or TunnelBear. Doing so means the company has to trust that potentially confidential information is being transmitted through the VPN provider’s network, is decrypted there and is safeguarded from network intrusion.

Protecting a company from potential cyber attacks requires a multi-faceted approach. There are risks internally with the office network, concerns when employees log into the system from outside the network, and concerns about the corporate website too. The IT department need to be well versed in different approaches to security to protect the company’s assets properly.