August 23rd, 2017

Here is a list of common cyber security mistakes that you need to eliminate from your computing environment. Cyber Security Mistakes
Did you know? 30,000 websites are hacked a day while 62 data incidents take place every second. 69% of enterprise security executives admitted that their data was stolen by “insiders”. Even worse, 4 out of 5 victims [of a breach] don’t realize they’ve been attacked for a week or longer.
These statistics are quite scary. Isn’t it?
In this scenario, you can’t solely rely on your antivirus to prevent data breaches. Cybersecurity is a constant process, where you need to alert against the latest threats.
In this blog, we have come up with six common security mistakes you should avoid to protect your critical data.

Using Weak or Simple Password:

Using a strong password is the basic lesson of cyber security. However, many businesses use simple and easy to remember passwords like 1234, ABCD or date of births. Sadly, these passwords are easily cracked by modern software. According to Verizon, 63% of the data breaches in 2016 resulted from the weak or stolen password. One study claims that 2 out of every 5 people using easy to remember passwords have experienced hacking and password stealing. 123456, QWERTY, welcome, admin, and abc123 have been listed as the “worst and terrible” passwords by Splash.com in its study.
Therefore, you need to make your password bit complicated by using numbers, letters and special characters. See if your systems are compatible with advanced authentication techniques like retina scanning or fingerprint scanning.

Lack of Employee Training:

Human error accounts 62% of the data security incidents, according to a report by Computer Weekly via ICO. The errors your management or employee may make are sharing passwords, sending the data to the wrong person, falling for a phishing scheme, allowing accounts with no ownership to exist, and letting anybody using the devices on the business’s system. Remember, your all security measures are of no use unless your employees are aware of cyber security. You can educate them on cyber security by….
  • a) Conducting regular cyber security and training sessions
  • b) Planning and implementing robust security policies
  • c) Testing their knowledge about cyber security more often
  • d) Alerting them to the dangers of hacking

Not Upgrading Your Software Regularly:

Do you ignore or close the messages reminding you about upgrading the software? Allowing software updates is an important thing to reinforce your cyber security. These updates keep your computer safe as they fix the bugs deployed by the hackers for getting a remote access of your system without your knowledge. If you don’t upgrade your software, your system is prone to viruses, malware and other types of attacks. The latest WannaCry ransomware has taken down millions of the PCs just because their software were not updated.

Relying Solely on Antivirus:

In today’s threat landscape, anti-virus technologies are not enough to thwart persistent and advanced cyber-attacks. What can be a good example of this when a popular antivirus brands failed to identify the infamous 2013 attack launched by Chinese hackers on the New York Time. Most of the traditional antiviruses are not effective enough to prevent sophisticated attacks. And the dated technology of your antivirus won’t deal with the new viruses created every day. In this scenario, you can do is to update your system often to minimize the spectrum of attacks.

Not Taking Your Data Backup:

It is important that you back up your data. Having an offsite backup option will help you retrieve the data after cyber-attack or other IT disaster. Cloud storage is an effective and convenient way to store and access your data on a daily basis.

Focusing Only on Critical Servers:

Businesses generally are not aware of the interconnectedness of networks. This is why they don’t realize that only focusing on critical servers may create a route for hackers to other devices or network that are less or no secured. Even a malicious access to your employee’s laptop can pose a threat to your entire network. To avoid such loopholes, you should cover each part and devices of your network.
So these are some common cyber security mistakes that make your business computing environment vulnerable to hacking, viruses, malware and other cyber threats. Needless to say, you should avoid making these mistakes to create a robust and well-informed cyber security framework for your business.