Why Is Cyber Security Important for New Entrepreneurs?
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A harsh reality of cyber security breach on a daily basis certainly scares us. The confidential information stored online being accessed by an unknown person sounds frightening.
Irrespective of the size of the company, the vulnerable, weak points are always exploited by hackers.
Today, we will talk about the vulnerabilities, the cybersecurity impact on your business and how well you should be protected from threats and attacks. The threat is as real as you and me.
The thought of your data and the data of your consumers being used by a third party without your consent will lead to legal complications. You need to ensure that you are protected digitally.
First, we will talk about vulnerabilities and cyber security features that you need to be aware of. Later, we will discuss the threats and its countermeasures.
Vulnerabilities
Sensitive and confidential information is the motivation for hackers. Sensitive data includes corporate secrets, personal information and intellectual property which can be sold for a considerable amount of money or worse use the data for illegal activities with catastrophic effects.
A constant threat to financial firms, retailers, health care industry, business giants have been posed by cyber terrorists and cybercriminals.
The most common weak points observed as vulnerabilities would be:
• Injection – This vulnerability occurs every time an application sends untrusted data to an interpreter. However, they are easy to identify by analyzing the code. Injection flaws are data loss and consequent exposure of sensitive data and lack of accountability or denial of access.
• Buffer Overflows – This vulnerability occurs when an application attempts to put more data in a buffer than it can hold. This causes data corruption due to overflow, crash program and execution of an arbitrary code which is malicious.
• Sensitive Data Exposure – Unauthorized access to the user database due to lack of necessary protection. This exposure would be stored data, transit, included in backups and user browsing data. Hackers try to exploit a data exposure flaw by stealing encryption keys and utilizing them in various sectors to steal data.
• Broken Authentication – This flaw occurs when an attacker uses leaks or flaws in the authentication procedures to impersonate other users. Some the most common affected sectors from this flaw are web applications, login, and logout, password management, remember me, timeouts and account update.
• Security Misconfiguration – Most common and most dangerous vulnerability which occurs due to outdated software, unnecessary services, default settings not being changed, incorrect exception management and use of default accounts. This vulnerability is insidious and can cause a catastrophic impact.
With these vulnerabilities, every entrepreneur will be concerned about the data security and privacy online.
Now, we will discuss the major aspect of cyber security for a new entrepreneur. There are a few simple steps that you need to consider and follow to improve your start-up business's cyber security which will help you grow your brand and not hinder it.
• Get your priorities in line
A good leader knows how to protect himself and the people who follow him. This is a cooperative effort to understand and implement the security protocol by all the people for effective decisions that protect your business.
In the event of a breach, all your employees and consumers alike should be informed about it and mitigate the situation, if not you’ll be entitled to pay a hefty price for it.
• Understand what information needs protection
The important data/assets and the not so important data should be well known. Source code for your program, sensitive information, plans, designs and financial information is a must that needs protection.
Depending on the regulatory requirements, you should be able to stop data breach from one sector to another.
• Set up protection
A constant watch on all your systems, updates, passwords, IP addresses, and data usage has to be around the clock thing. What will happen when the system is breached? This part of the plan will help counter the hack and stop it at the earliest.
Advance protection in place will help in making quick decisions, and the concerned people need to be informed regarding the breach.
• Limitations of data exposure
The information that you expose online should be very limited. Only the products and services offered should be visible.
What needs to be avoided here are:
* Don’t share accounts
* Multiple applications and same password is not recommended
* Close unused accounts
* Multifactor authentication if available
• Back up your sensitive data
A data backup is a must for a startup. If you are serious about protecting data, a backup with a threat intelligence platform is one of the best security measures that a small business can undertake. It is cost effective since a threat intelligence platform will have some firms will lessen the burden economically.
Conclusion
A startup will have a lot of things to focus on, and data security should be one of them. If you showcase the protection level of the consumer information as your top priority, you could certainly expect a smooth transition in establishing your business.
Being an entrepreneur, you should be well aware of the technology used for protection in case of emergencies. Knowing how the security system works will certainly help develop a countermeasure in case of a breach much faster than the security firms that you hire.
