Your Company Could be Making These Mistakes and Causing a HUGE Cyber Security Risk!
Matt Archer
November 3, 2020
Cyber Security is a big deal!
The internet is continuing to grow at a fast pace and more companies than ever are turning to Cloud Solutions and interconnected applications in order to help increase efficiency, improve ROI and improve the quality of work. However, one thing that many companies neglect when modernizing their infrastructure is the security of their data. Cyber security is more important than ever, as companies are getting more and more connected to the internet. Yet people neglect this aspect, leaving themselves and their company open to cyber-attacks and hacks from both without and within.
| "Most enterprises today use on average 88 different cloud apps, each of which leave fragments of data and content everywhere, including information that should be restricted, confidential and governed." - Paul Chapman (CIO, Box.com) |
Identifying Vulnerabilities
The first step in solving this problem is understanding what the problem is and how it’s going to impact your business. Data Breaches happen in a myriad of ways, but there are two areas that your company has a large degree of control over to ensure your data and operations stay safe and secure.
- External Threats
- Internal Threats
These two areas govern the types of threats to your organizations data, from without and within. Both are equally important and will be examined in more detail.
External Cyber Security Threats
The external side of cyber security has to a lot do with keeping unwanted intruders (often called bad actors) out of the system. Many malicious bad actors tend to target weaker and more vulnerable companies that use outdated operating systems or without proper security applications in place to protect them.
Around 55% of data breaches come from employees not being careful.[1] These come from innocuous-sounding things such sending confidential emails via un-encrypted emails that are intercepted by third parties, sharing private links with inappropriate people or clicking on bad links in phished emails that lead to malware or viruses being installed on the user’s computer that gives the bad actors access into the company’s database.
It’s vital to identify where your company may be vulnerable to bad actors. This comes many times from auditing your systems to determine if any penetration from bad actors has already occurred and if any applications are not up to date and protected in the best ways possible.
Internal Cyber Security Threats
Internal Cyber Security refers to keeping your data secure from those within your organization. Oftentimes, as small businesses grow, proper permissions for applications often get neglected and what ends up happening is people get access to more than they should. This puts potentially sensitive data in the wrong hands and can impact the bottom line, as the average cost of a data breach is $3.9 million.[2] The effects of these breaches can last for years depending on the severity of the breach and the data accessed.
In some cases, a malicious individual may intentionally take advantage of this in order to use the data for their own purposes, but more often it is well-meaning users unknowingly accessing or transmitting data they shouldn’t even have access to due to lax permissions. For example, 90% of content shared is used for viewing but the vast majority of it is given editing permissions.[3]
Since the consequences of ignoring or half-heartedly dealing with data security can be disastrous to a company’s infrastructure, reputation and bottom-line it’s of vital importance to handle them sooner than later.
Fixing Vulnerabilities Before it’s too late
As you have seen, data breaches can happen to just about anyone, but are much more likely to occur to companies that have weak or non-existent security. These breaches can come both from outside sources using methods to break in as well as internally from workers whose access is much more robust than required to do their job.
If you have been breached, it’s crucial to take the right steps to remove bad actors from the system, secure your data and determine what data was taken.
It’s is also important to provide training to workers so they can practice good habits such as not sharing confidential or important data through unencrypted methods such as regular email threads or documents without password protection where hackers could potential gain access if they break into an individual user’s account.
These habits will help lower the chances of external threats from breaching your systems. The best method of fixing security risks is to prevent them from ever occurring at all.
Final Words
Now that you’ve identified some of the more common security mistakes companies make, it’s time to plug those holes before the proverbial ship starts to sink.
Positive Results has experience in identifying and resolving common cyber security issues through full system audits, implementing back-ups to solve for the rare case of lost data, creating user training to help workers understand how to better navigate the applications they use and updating security permissions so users only have access to what they need, when they need it.
We have the expertise to handle a variety of data security scenarios and can help protect your company from making mistakes so you can focus on helping your clients instead of apologizing to them.
If you need help in identifying systems or processes in your enterprise that may have data security vulnerabilities, contact us at:
Positive Results™ Custom Business Solutions
440.499.4944
[1] https://blog.box.com/weakest-link-how-organizationscan-securely-manage-content-cloud
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
