The Basics of Cyber Security for Businesses
Doing business in the digital age is like nothing else. Modern technology is incredibly advanced, and companies can take advantage of that tech to optimize their business models. On the other hand, the benefits of modern tech are not without their downsides, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in the relationship between businesses and hackers. Hackers will stop at nothing to get a hold of valuable data of various kinds, and businesses are inordinately targeted because of their stores of trade secrets, market data, and the personal and financial information of customers. Protecting your business and your clientele from bad actors must be a priority in the digital age, and these tips can help you do so.
Cyber Attacks
When a hacker disrupts the operations of a business, or does so to the lives of private citizens, that is called a cyber attack. However, cyber attacks also come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Understanding the risks of, and how to handle, a security breach is a necessary first step to protecting yourself from them. Easily the most common cyber attack method is malware, but this is a threat that’s typically easy to avoid. It remains popular because it can be planted on an unsecure website until someone happens to trigger the trap. However, businesses in particular face not only a higher risk, but also the full gamut of the hackers’ arsenal. Likewise, you’ll have to pull out all the stops in order to balance the scales.
Securing Your Website
While you may realize that malware is a threat, you may also believe that encountering that threat is simply not likely. You’d mostly be right, but that’s not a universal rule. The nature of doing business is such that you may often find yourself happening upon unsecure websites as you work with other small businesses. Likewise, your own company website isn’t secure by default. While you would think it would be a native feature of the internet, encryption and decryption are additional features that are all but necessary. Paying for encryption protocol certification is the first step in your battle against hackers, because it will protect data as it moves through your website, preventing hackers from intercepting data or from infiltrating the network. This is the absolute bare minimum that you can to protect your customers, not to mention your company.
Securing Your App
A company’s website will serve as an important hub for e-commerce, but it’s not the only one. In fact, e-commerce apps are king when it comes to providing consumers with more convenient ways to engage with their favorite brands. Therefore, the development and maintenance of these apps will have a similarly profound impact on the customer experience, up to and including cybersecurity. The mass proliferation of e-commerce apps has been made possible in large part by APIs.
Application programming interfaces are software development tools that provide businesses a template to follow and lays the groundwork for developing an app quickly and cost effectively. However, this can be a blessing or a curse, because the widespread availability of APIs gives hackers the tools they need to probe for weaknesses that, by and large, translate directly to software developing using those APIs.
This means that hackers can get the keys to the kingdom without breaking the law or a sweat. API security is a necessary service that can help you to patch up any exploitable weaknesses of your app’s source code to protect your customer’s private and financial data, not to mention the security of your business’s network.
While the open seas of e-commerce present numerous threats and challenges, it remains a crucial part of the modern commercial landscape. Cybersecurity experts have made it their mission to counter all known cyber attack methods and to anticipate new developments in the tool kits of hackers. Using these tips, you can safeguard your business against bad actors to keep your business and your customers safe from harm.
