Cybersecurity is currently the top priority of online business owners today. New technological developments improve people’s lives year after year. But unfortunately, these technological advances give rise to new cybersecurity threats and attacks as well.
The fact is that cybersecurity is solely a team effort and accountability. Security should never operate aimlessly, function in a void without direction, or be responsible for one person as their exclusive obligation.
The lack of a cybersecurity plan of action can negatively affect business plans and goals and have substantial consequences if not taken seriously. For example, in case of a data breach, it will affect the business’s name, put customers at risk, and have disastrous financial consequences. Such reasons highlight the necessity for transformed organizational attention to cybersecurity and prioritize it.
In this article, we’re going to highlight some of the cybersecurity questions you need to be asking and make sure you take all the necessary steps to strengthen your security online.
What Are The Basics Of Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity is a vast topic but a vital one nonetheless. As an online business owner, you need to keep several things in mind regarding cybersecurity and taking the right steps towards protecting your online business. In contrast, cybersecurity is one of the most important aspects of business; it is often placed in lower priority.
So the very first thing you need to do is give cybersecurity more prominence. Cybersecurity is essentially the act of defending computers, servers, mobile and electronic devices, networks, and most importantly, the data from external malicious attacks. It is a group of technologies, processes, and well-defined practices planned and intended to protect your data from attack, damage, or unauthorized access.
A major part of your data can be sensitive and confidential information that you would not want to be leaked or in the wrong hands, such as financial data, personal details of customers, for which illicit access could have adverse consequences.
What Are The Risks Of Doing Online Business?
Many cyber threats are looming on the internet today, from the risk of malicious attacks by an individual or an organization to a bot or malware trying to corrupt data. Unfortunately, the ugly truth is that no business online is invulnerable to cyber-attacks. So let’s explore some of the cyber threats in depth.
Transaction Fraud
A transaction fraud occurs when a business transaction online is conducted using a stolen financial data like stolen credit card details. This kind of fraud has been on the rise recently and poses a huge security task for financial organizations such as banks and credit card companies.
For example, a payment is labeled duplicitous when a cardholder’s credentials are used online without knowing the original owner of those permits. Still, by the time the cardholder sees a payment transaction on their credit card statement, it’s already too late. In such a case, the victim then has to dispute the illegal transaction by contacting the financial institution.
A direct Site Attack
Distributed Denial of Service, or DDOS for short, directly targets your website online and disrupts it. In this attack, a third party tries to get your website offline and inactive using hackers that use malware and bots to push your website off the server, making it unavailable to the public. Since people can’t see your website, there would be no traffic; hence you would lose revenue. This kind of attack usually happens during a sale season when traffic is high.
Brute Force Attacks
A Brute Force Attack is cracking a customer’s password by using an exhaustive search process. Although this attack relies heavily on guessing the various combinations of a password, it can be dangerous when the password is cracked or hacked.
The attacker can use the customer’s credentials to make fraudulent transactions without the user’s knowledge. The other major outcome of a brute force attack is that the attacker who processes the user’s account details may keep changing their passwords and username, ultimately making them stop using your website.
Bot Attack
In this sort of attack, the attacker usually develops or uses unique bots or programs to get details about your products or services online like prices, stocks, etc. The attacker uses this information to offer lower prices on your competitor’s website, which eventually leads to losing a lot of traffic.
How to Stay Protected From Such Attacks?
Typically, those websites that are unsecured sites would show HTTP before the URL. However, HTTPS is the more protected form of unsecured HTTP. HTTPS increases the security of your website by encrypting it and preventing your website’s data from being openly visible. Websites that do not have HTTPS are at a higher risk of not only cyber-attacks but spamming too.
However, all this encryption is inadequate unless and until someone is watching over this communication process and ensuring that it is secured. This is the job for SSL certificates. SSL certificates are a transfer layer of contact between the server and your website.
An SSL certificate essentially works as an overseer, ensuring that every communication is safe from any external attack. However, there are other benefits of SSL certificates that build your website’s credibility and reliability amongst users. For example, many times, customers may not enter a website that doesn’t have the lock icon before the website’s address link or if the HTTPS protocol is not there.
By using an SSL certificate, however, this scenario will not arise, and the visitor can trust your website. One issue is that a single-domain SSL certificate works for just one domain at a time.
If you have multiple domains and first-level subdomains, you need a wildcard SSL certificate, and comodo wildcard SSL is your best option. A wildcard certificate is a solitary certificate with a wildcard character in the domain name field, which permits the certificate to secure multiple first-level sub-domain names in addition to the chosen main domain.
Who Has Access to Your Data?
Another essential question to ask is who all have access to the sensitive data and how important it is for them to access business operations? For example, you may discover that some of your end users have restricted access to confidential data. You may also realize that these users transfer or store this data that poses a high risk for your business. This poses a huge security risk, and you need to revise your security policies by removing privileged access to classified or sensitive data sources.
Conclusion
While these are just some of the questions you need to be asking regarding cybersecurity and your website, what needs to be kept in mind is that at no cost should you compromise online security? Instead, have a properly laid out plan and security in place; invest in security measures like buying and installing an SSL certificate and anti-malware software. This article has brought you one step closer to taking the right cybersecurity steps.
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