4 Cybersecurity Steps Businesses Can Take Today

The cybersecurity landscape is always evolving, with new attacks targeting businesses of all sizes each day. With more than 3.4 billion daily phishing attacks, hackers are working harder than ever to take hold of businesses. SeedSpark’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Taylor Busby, sat down with Axios Charlotte to share more about the basic steps that small businesses can take to defend themselves against today’s cyberattacks.

Read the full article from Axios Charlotte: Cyberattacks mount for Charlotte’s small and mid-size businesses

Top Cybersecurity Tips for Small Businesses

1. Back up your data and maintain your backups offline.

While regular cloud backups are the industry standard, keeping a physical offline backup of your machine is important for ensuring you’re able to recover if your entire network and cloud server are compromised. Performing frequent backups – at least daily – keeps lost work at a minimum while also providing a quick recovery during a data loss event.

2. Create an up-to-date business continuity plan.

With the recent examples of Colonial Pipeline and JBS peppering the headlines, the impact that a cyberattack can have on even the largest businesses is clear. These examples and more show the value of having a business continuity plan in place before a disaster strikes. Often known as a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan, this set of steps and processes helps a business ensure that it’s ready to recover and resume operations ASAP after an attack.

3. Learn how to identify and report phishing emails. 

As inboxes around the world are flooded with malicious emails, it’s important that employees are able to easily identify the telltale signs of a phishing email as soon as one hits their inbox. Staying on the lookout for unusual email addresses, strange email links, and generic greetings are all important steps to take when identifying potential phishing emails. In addition to email security software, it’s important that business leaders provide training for their employees to help keep their data safe from attacks.

4. Create strong, unique passwords for each account.

In addition to enabling multi-factor authentication, it’s important to a strong, unique password for each account. Google reports that 66% of Americans use the same password across multiple accounts, but what’s even worse is that 24% have used basic passwords like “abc123” or “Password” to protect accounts… passwords that don’t provide much protection at all. Creating a complex password that mixes numbers, special characters, and uppercase/lowercase letters makes the hackers’ jobs much harder when it comes to tapping into your personal data.

Did you know that there are 8 different ways that someone can steal a password? Fill out the form to the right to download our guide, The Art of Password Theft, to learn about the common methods that hackers take and how to protect yourself online.