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How to Prevent Data Breaches: 5 Tips for Your Small Business

By April 11, 2019No Comments6 min read
data-breach

Before starting with the prevention of data breaches, we will try to know about the concept clearly. A data breach can be defined as a security incident where sensitive information is hacked or stolen. The information related to business, health, or financial information is pinched by an unauthorized hacker. This could be an intentional or unintentional phenomenon.

These incidents are performed by black hatters and are also is classified as a criminal offense. People who are either are related to criminal activities like hacking, or the ones who have access to the data storage media perform data breaching.

There can be many people responsible for this activity of data leakage. Most of the times it is the hackers or can be influenced by competitor firms to gain valuable insight into the activities of a rival company. The data that is stolen is extremely valuable as it can be used for various malpractices.

The primary cause of data leakage is money. The hackers can take all the required information about our debit or credit cards or our personal information through which they can blackmail you and earn more money. We can cancel our cards or change our contact information, but when it comes to our personal details, we need to approach the police for help.

If the data of a company is stolen, then it affects the productivity of the company. The company’s reputation goes down as the clients fail to maintain faith and trust in the concerned organization. The clients that are the victims of this may terminate their relationship with the company and due to this; the other parties may also lose their interest in the company as they will have a fear of their data being stolen. There are many ways and actions which can be taken in order to tackle the situation of a data breach.

First of all, you need to stay calm and investigate thoroughly as there is a chance of more loss if a wrong decision is taken. You need to gain back the trust that your customers have lost in your company. So carefully handle the situation before you start to inform your clients about the said breach. Thus with the help of the security and forensic officers, try to fix the issue.

There are five kinds of data breach:

  • Denial of service
  • Malware
  • Ransomware
  • Password attacks
  • Phishing

Ways to Prevent Data Breaching:

There are many ways that can be used to prevent your data from getting into the hands of wrong people. Following are 5 ways through which data breaching can be prevented.

Automate:

We always search for a more comfortable and smart way to perform our work. When it comes to math, we can calculate everything by ourselves but we take the help of a calculator so that human errors can be mitigated. Similarly, the errors can be performed by humans while doing a task recklessly or while initiating a complex task. So there is a need to automate the things in order to secure them and to protect them from malicious websites. Hence, we need to filter them by using mail.

Backup:

Generally having a backup file helps us not to lose our data. We have a backup option in our mobiles where we backup the photos, documents to our mail so that we can gain access to them even if they get deleted. Even if some virus has deleted your system’s content, then a reliable backup system will help you restore the data instead of starting from scratch.

Perform Vulnerability Assessment and Stop Drive-By Downloads:

The vulnerability assessment is done once in a quarter, but it should be done weekly, and the organizations must perform the scan in the system network both internally and externally. There are so many breaches that occur via drive-by download, and this can exploit the entire machine by simply accessing the website. Therefore, special attention must be given in this field in order to limit data breach.

Encryption of Data:

Even the chats have encryption facility provided so that a conversation can be held on a private basis without any interruptions. Similarly, we need to provide encryption to the essential data files that require high security and the files which are very important in order to maintain the company reputation. If the employees of an organization carry their own laptops to work, then the organization must provide them with a key called encryption key.

User Authorization:

It is not needed to provide all the data to the employees. The authorization plays a vital role in saving data from leakage. We always find recommendations while creating a password to our email, or any other login’s. It also gives us the status of password if its “good,” “fair,” or “strong”. We also find the instructions highlighting to use a combination of uppercase letters, lower case letters, or numbers and so on. If we are that cautious for individual data, then it requires double the cautious levels to protect the data of an entire organization. We can save the data which is present in a system with the help of an effective password, but the physical data files present in the office also needs security. Hence, the management needs to aware and must not authorize any and every employee to the vaults or the computer systems which have essential data. An RF ID or fingerprint authorization access could help to eradicate the aspect of data breaching completely.

Data breach is a relevant threat which must be considered by every business organization. The corporate world has experienced a lot of benefits due to the introduction of the internet. However, the aspect of cyber-crimes and data breaching are also on the rise which is the creation of the internet as well. Hence, corporate entities must stay aware and incorporate necessary precautions within their operations so that no data can be misused by hackers in the long run.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.