Within the last year alone, you’ve probably had your telco, energy provider, health insurer, or investment institution fall victim to a cyber-attack.
Receiving news of these breaches and the potential that your personal information has been leaked is confronting on many levels. It also poses an important question. If such large and presumably well-protected organisations can be hacked, what does that mean for your business?
The unfortunate reality for many companies is that they are significantly ill-equipped given the ever-present risk, and could easily fall prey to an attack that would make an ATO audit feel like a nice Sunday brunch by comparison.
While there is no such thing as a 100% full-proof system, there are many steps you can put in place to reduce the likelihood of an attack, and the severity of the impact should an attack occur.
This article will outline some of these cyber security fundamentals. We have also included a link below to a comprehensive cyber security planning resource to help protect your business from being held to ‘Cyber Ransom’ by sophisticated hackers.
Cyber-security/anti-ransomware preparation
Prevention is better than cure, which is why you need both a cyber security plan and ransomware safe backups.
These two elements work in tandem with one another, and when you build strong capabilities in both areas, you get a cumulative benefit in protection in the event of an attack.
Cyber Security Plan
The Blackhats (the hackers) are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and even the most IT-literate, tech-savvy amongst us can fall victim to a scam attack.
Therefore, businesses must develop and deploy cyber security plans that encompass:
- staff training
- e-mail screening
- web filtering
- password management
- patch management
- and other such components
Ransomware Safe Backups
In the event of a ransomware attack, if you have a ransomware-safe backup, you can use that backup to recover your organisation’s data without having to consider paying the ransom.
It is crucial that at least one of your off-site backups is not accessible from your server and that this backup is verified from a remote location on a regular basis. The verification ensures the integrity of the backup.
If your server backups remain intact, then they will allow you to recover from any “disaster” and will allow your organisation to recover from data loss or data corruption due to any of the following scenarios:
- User errors.
- Physical disaster:
- Fire
- Flood
- Software updates with unintended consequences (i.e. software bug).
- Hardware faults.
- Cyber-security breach (including a ransomware attack).
Protecting Your Business
Back in the 90s, when I started work as a network administrator, most businesses considered IT security to mean locking the server room and taking the backup tapes home in case the office burned down.
At the time (and up until quite recently), ransomware attacks were comparably rare, so common sense and diligence were often seen as suitable defence mechanisms. For many businesses, the lack of attacks proved their strategy suitable.
Not anymore.
To learn how to protect your business from being held to ‘Cyber Ransom’ by sophisticated hackers, download your copy of our latest cyber security resource from the link below. I hope you find it to be a valuable resource.
Vaughan Wickham is the Co-Founder of CyberX, an Australian-owned and operated cyber security firm specialising in protecting organisations with 10-50 users from ransomware attacks by deploying best-practice cyber security solutions.
Download Vaughan’s comprehensive cyber security guide, Cyber Security Essentials for Australian Engineering Firms With On-Premise Servers to get the insights that can help protect your business.
