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How to Prevent Hacking: A Guide for Businesses

Are you worried that you’re not doing enough to keep your company safe from all the threats on the internet? You have reason to be concerned.

Cybercrime is more common than ever and will likely increase even more in the future. The market as a whole is expecting to see $6 trillion in damages in 2021 alone.

If you want to keep your company safe, learning how to prevent hacking is essential. Follow the steps below to learn what it takes to prevent hacking.

Create a Password Policy

Your passwords are the keys to everything you do online. Unfortunately, not many people take them as seriously as they should.

To start, too many people use weak passwords to protect their accounts. It’s tough to remember long and complex passwords. That’s why people use words and phrases that are easy for them to remember.

Unfortunately, that also means hackers have a way to guess your passwords. If someone has personal information about your employees, it makes their passwords suspectable to being guessed.

Every password should contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and one unique character. This complexity makes your employee’s passwords much harder to figure out.

Use Two-Factor Authentication

Even complex passwords aren’t always enough to protect your accounts. There are other ways to capture your employee’s passwords than guessing personal information. If this happens, you need another way to protect your accounts.

Two-factor authentication provides you a secondary authentication method. When your employees successfully use their password to log in, they’re sent a code to a secondary device. These codes can be sent to an email account, phone number, authenticator application, or hardware device.

This means that nobody can access your account without access to your secondary devices. Anyone with your employee’s password will be locked out.

Buy a Hardware Firewall

It’s hard to protect your company if you don’t understand what happens on your company network. Without a hardware firewall, you won’t be able to do this.

A hardware firewall is a machine that sits in front of every device on your network. Any internet traffic that passes in or out of your business network will pass through this device. This means you can control the flow of traffic on your network.

Your firewall’s goal is to monitor for any suspicious traffic and block it before it becomes a problem. Firewalls know what issues to look for and can automatically stop them before they become issues.

A firewall also allows you to block bad sites on the internet. While most of your employees won’t browse bad parts of the internet, you can’t take the chance that someone makes a mistake.

Install Anti-Malware Software on Computers

While a firewall is a great first line of defense, it won’t always catch all your company’s threats. Your team still can download malicious files on their computers. Those files are often malware viruses.

If you look at the recent data breaches, many of them are the result of malware infections. Malware is files that contain code that is written by hackers. Once it’s run on your office computers, it infects the computer it’s run on and spreads across your network.

The good news is that anti-malware software can protect you against most malware. This software contains malware definitions and can detect when downloaded files have these definitions. If your anti-malware detects a problem, it quarantines the problem files before they can cause issues for your business.

Of course, malware protection won’t be able to protect you from everything. New malware is released all the time, and it takes time to update malware definitions. However, as long as you regularly update your software, your company will stay protected from malware in most situations.

Use a VPN for Remote Workers

Remote work has taken off in recent years. Technology has made it, so people don’t need to stay in an office for eight hours every day to get their work done. They can find almost everything they need to do their jobs online.

Unfortunately, remote work also opens the door for security threats. If your employees connect to your office network remotely, there’s a chance that they invite a cyberthreat with them.

You can protect your company by requiring your team to use a VPN when they work. A VPN is a secure connection that encrypts web traffic. If someone is using an unsecured connection to work, nobody monitoring that traffic will be able to see what’s going on.

If you have a hardware firewall, you likely already have a VPN available. Many professional firewall products include a VPN on their firewall to help your company stay safe.

Train Your Team

The best security isn’t always enough to keep your company safe. While your hardware and software are known risks, your employees are the unknown factor you always need to watch out for. That’s why people are the most significant security risk for businesses.

You can mitigate this risk by ensuring your team knows what they should and shouldn’t do when they’re on the internet. You can do this by providing an excellent training program for everyone.

You can do this with online video courses or hire a professional to come in and train your team. Every person should go through this training before they’re allowed to get on your company network. When people know what you expect of them, they’re less likely to make a mistake and introduce risk to your business.

Now You Know How to Prevent Hacking

At this point, you should have a better idea about how to prevent hacking. Now that you know how not to get hacked, it’s time to take the tips above and put them into practice. Don’t wait another minute because the more time your company is insecure, the greater chance you have of suffering from cybercrime.

If you found value in this post, head back to our blog to read more. You’ll find more posts about how to take advantage of tech in your business.

Shehbaz Malik
Shehbaz Malik
A computer science graduate. Interested in emerging technological wonders that are making mankind more approachable to explore the universe. I truly believe that blockchain advancements will bring long-lasting revolutions in people’s lives. Being a blogger, I occasionally share my point of views regarding the user experience of digital products.
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