As a cybersecurity company in Miami, we know that data breaches can cost businesses millions of dollars to fix and can ruin a brand. The best response to a data breach is ensuring that you never have one.
Precautionary measures will reduce your risk of a data breach ever impacting your business.
5 Strategies to Prevent Data Breaches
Businesses hire security professionals to monitor and protect their network and data because it’s a continual process. Hackers will not stop trying to access data from businesses and will work hard to find vulnerabilities, bugs or other ways to gain access to your business’ data.
However, a few steps that you can take today to prevent data breaches are:
- Educate: Your employees should be well-educated and trained on how to follow security best practices. A few of the topics to discuss include how to recognize malware and phishing scams, updating software and Internet best practices.
- Updates: Strict policies ought to be in place to automatically update software and systems. Zero-day exploits will leave you open to having your data breached. If you have systems in place to update software and systems automatically, it will greatly improve your business’ security.
- Multi-layer Your Security: Attacks can happen on multiple levels. If you have just one layer of security, it opens your business up to a data breach. Multiple security levels can help reduce the risk of a data breach, such as advanced access control systems, forcing password updates, installing virus and malware detection systems and more.
- Store Data Safely: All data should be stored in secure servers and encrypted. Encryption will help keep data safe even if hackers gain access to it. Storing data in plain text is a major security risk.
- Run Risk Assessments: Security risk assessments can be executed by internal and external teams to identify weaknesses in your network’s security. Every assessment must be followed by implementing corrective measures to patch vulnerabilities.
However, if there’s a data breach, you have the responsibility of alerting customers and clients of the issue.
Responding to Data Breaches the Right Way
The FTC has a thorough guide on what to do if your business experiences a data breach. First, you need to secure your operations, and this may mean contacting us to find security holes and prevent a future attack from occurring.
You'll also need to:
- Secure data for digital forensics
- Prevent additional data loss
- Fix vulnerabilities
Once systems are safe and the risk of any further data being stolen is eliminated, it’s time to execute your communications plan. The communication plan should outline:
- Who to communicate with, including customers, investors and employees
- What to tell the public about the breach
- Explaining the corrective steps that you’ve taken to secure business data
Depending on your type of business, you may have legal requirements to reach out to law enforcement or certain regulatory agencies.
Do you want an expert in cybersecurity in Miami to help you prevent and respond to data breaches? If so, give us a call today to learn how we can help you harden your network’s security.