Data privacy is a crucial part of any business as your business can meet regulations, meet client expectations, and prevent financial and information loss.
As technology improves, hackers also improve their ways, which makes businesses more vulnerable to attacks of all forms. Small businesses that don’t have the proper security infrastructure are prime targets for those attacks, and any successful data breach can bring the business to its knees.
As cybersecurity becomes a significant concern to businesses, the adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ makes a lot of sense when you want to protect your business. Therefore, you should find ways to detect and prevent any data breach before it happens instead of correcting your system after an attack. This will help to save costs and also prevent any damage to your business and reputation.
Here are some excellent ways to detect an attempted data breach at an early stage:
Conduct Cybersecurity Audits
Often, hackers will try to find any vulnerability in your security system and use it to steal information. Even with a good security system, there are cases such as network failure, negligence by your team, and several others that may lead to such vulnerabilities in the team.
To prevent such occurrences, you should conduct a system audit once or twice a year to identify areas of potential attacks. You can get an expert IT company to conduct the system audit by measuring your security against an optimum standard to identify any area that falls short and correct them.
Use Threat Detection Tools
There are several threat detections tools that you can employ in your business and identify any unauthorized attempt to access your system. While these tools can be expensive, they’re worthwhile in boosting your cybersecurity efforts.
Antivirus and malware protection tools will warn you of any suspicious packages that can be used to steal information from your system. You can also use tools that keep activity logs in your systems, such as login attempts, leakages, and other suspicious activities. A review of these activities will help you identify which areas of the system were breached and correct them.
More advanced tools can also alert you in real-time whenever there’s any suspicious activity in the system so you can work immediately to restore the system or prevent any further attacks.
Train Employees On Potential Attacks
Negligence is a significant concern in cybersecurity as employees can fall victim to phishing attacks by clicking links containing malware. Also, employees can leave their computers on without logging out, which makes it easy for another person to access information. Sharing information with third parties is also a cause for data breaches that employees may not know.
You should train your employees to identify risks that put your business in jeopardy. Your IT department may be well aware of such cases, but the other departments may not; therefore, you should train them. Training your employees can help identify any attempt at data breaches early enough and prevent it or report to the right personnel. Employees can also watch out for slow internet speed, failed login attempts, or changes on the website and report the cases to the IT department as it could indicate a potential attack.
Use Global Threat Intelligence
Fighting cybercrime is a global effort that requires extensive security infrastructure and capital. Unfortunately, not all businesses have this type of infrastructure or the financial muscle to fight cybercrime. Therefore, your business should leverage the global efforts on threat intelligence and cybersecurity to identify any data breach.
Because of the progressive nature of the global threat intelligence, it will help process data faster than your system would. This system can identify any threat that was previously unknown or would’ve taken time to identify.
Conduct Penetration Testing And Document Outcomes
Penetration testing is an attack on your system to help identify any vulnerability. The testing is often conducted by white hat hackers who will then help scale your security system to meet the required standard to protect against other attacks.
Penetration testing can include data breaches and other network attacks, where any vulnerability, outcome, and solution will be documented. Your business can then refer to the document in the future to identify any attempt of data breaches and correct them as they happen. The penetration testing should be done every time you acquire new software or hardware or upgrade your system.
Conclusion
As data privacy becomes more critical to organizations today, the need to improve security systems to curb data breaches is more crucial. The best way to protect the data against any form of attack is by detecting the threats early enough and setting up ways to protect your business. Fortunately, there are several ways that you can use to identify the breaches, and you should adopt them to protect your business and your sensitive data.
Baburajan Kizhakedath
