Cyber Security Technology and its advancements have become one of the largest parts of our everyday lives.
Whether this be at home on in the office, PCs or IPADs, through network access or Wi-Fi we cannot function daily without it!
However, what often slips to the back of our mind when using these technological tools is the threats and security risks, we may be exposing ourselves and our finances to.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic the world may have been slowing down, but security violations and hacker attacks are reportedly up by 667%, a latest study has shown, averaging at every 39 seconds.
This is most likely due to the fact that businesses are now running with employees working remotely, without the secure and correct provisions put in place. Although your company network may be highly secure, this can be largely affected when working remotely on home unsecure Wi-Fi systems.
It has also been found that 43% of cyber-attacks target small businesses directly, meaning tl1ese can be gravely hit by the impact when targeted. Juniper Research suggests the cost to the economy from data breaches in 2020 could well exceed $150 million.
Even large-scale organisations can be severely hit by hacking scants. WHO has claimed they have received a dramatic and significant increase in cyber threats and attacks since the start of COVID-19, which could prove detrimental to the organisation during the current global crisis.
Another study conducted by Symantec found that 40% of attacks are on those organisations with less than 500 employees, which proves that businesses of any size, structure and standing can be a victim of the ever-growing online crime. As a global community we are more connected than ever before and is important to ensure you have the correct provisions in place for your business to guarantee you are protected.
The key is prevention before intervention; if you can ensure you are doing everything possible before an attack it will save the business a lot of time, money and loss in faith from clients.
On the 19th May 2020 Easyjet reportedly had 2,200 passenger credit card details stolen after a hacking scandal which resulted in not only a huge embarrassment for such a large-scale company, but lack of trust from clients as to using the company in future and the cancellation of multiple credit cards. Although a company of such a substantial size would have security provisions in place; this goes to show how advanced cyber crime and its perpetrators are becoming.
As we progress daily technologically, the risk to systems and those who wish to misuse them will always be great, which is why it is imperative that the correct cyber security protection measures are considered when creating business plans and developments at all times.
The good news is that there are ways to secure yourself and your business
To ensure that you are as well protected with the correct procedures implemented before any of these security breaches are to occur.
There are many avenues you can look into when it comes 10 cyber security measures to put in place for your business. The larger your organisation the more secure and advanced you would require your protection levels to be. It is important to make sure that you have the correct precautions in place to ensure that cybercrime does not make yourself and your business a victim.
This is why we have launched our new easily affordable yet highly efficient and effective prevention platform. Secure GI is a new, Security as a Service (SaaS) offering from Hedgehog Security (sec.gi). Designed and built exclusively for the Gibraltar business community, Secure GI looks at the seven key areas of Cyber Security Exposure that almost every business has: The Attack Surface: How much of your infrastructure, systems and applications are exposed to the internet.
The Vulnerabilities: How many vulnerabilities are present within your infrastructure, systems and applications. Secure GI also assesses how old these vulnerabilities are and how easily exploited they can be.
Your Encrypted Services: Secure GI looks at the services you have published to the internet and how many of them have good levels of encryption.
Your Remote Management: How many Remote Management services you have exposed to the internet that can reached by anybody.
Storage: With 80% of all data breaches being from badly configured internet accessible storage, Secure GI assesses you direct storage and then hunts for badly secured/configured cloud storage solutions.
The Web: Secure Gl runs in-depth web application security assessments against your web applications and sites to ensure that there are no gaps in your security.
Potentially Harmful Torrents: Have your users been accessing and downloading Bit Torrent files? Secure GI will identify these.
Secure GI provides you with a regular security feed, providing you weekly updated scans. And you don’t have to be technical to use it. Setting up requires nothing more than your email address and any domain names you use. The system will determine the rest for you.
Where Secure GI identifies critical or high risk, you can pass the issue to our team in the World Trade Center and leave us to fix the issues.
As we move forward in technological advancements every single day it is key to ensure that you are doing the utmost to keep your systems, your employees but most importantly the entire running of your business free and secure from external threats which could cause extensive and irreversible damage.
By keeping these safety procedures in place and factoring in your cyber security as just as important a pan of your daily running as any other business factor is key in our advancement in technology and business; prevention before the damage and not after the intervention should always be your focus.
Feature by Peter Bassill
Founder & Senior Security Researcher at Hedgehog Security
