6 Tips for Identifying and Preventing Cybercrime
Cybercrime is relentless and will not vanish anytime soon. Hackers seem to relish the magnitude of their power and wish to strive for more. Stealing your finances and subjecting you to cyberbullying is just the tip of the iceberg. What dwells underneath the surface is far more sinister. Hackers can steal identities, cause a phishing attack on a massive scale, as witnessed by over 70% of companies in 2020 (according to Jumpstart), and extort you for cash. Let’s see tips for identifying and preventing cybercrime.
At the same time, highly ambitious hackers try their hand at causing data breaches which costs over $8 million in the US alone. Cybercrimes are not easy to detect, which is why cybersecurity costs will grow more than 10% by next year. Therefore it’s essential you identify and combat cybercrimes before the damage becomes far too expensive to repair. Here’s what you need to know.
Instruct Your Employees on Cybersecurity
While you may know to avoid getting caught in a cyber trap, your employees may not. This makes them more vulnerable to cyberattacks that can cause them to expose confidential business data. When employees go online, teach them etiquette on using the internet without falling victim to these attacks. Guide them on avoiding suspicious hyperlinks, emails, pop-ups, and phishing. Over 90% of phishing attacks happen through emails. Practicing caution saves you from becoming a part of the statistics.
You may even lean on psychological explanations to educate your employees about the criminal mindset. These can help identify patterns in cybercrime, such as what type of malware gets commonly used. A master’s degree in cyberpsychology can help you do this better with deeper insights into cybercrimes, cyberbullying, and the aftermath of the two. Equipped with cybercrime knowledge, your employees will navigate much more safely online.
Keep Your System Updated Through Patch Management
Patch management is a process that identifies updates needed for your software and applies them. The purpose of a patch is to detect bugs in the software and fix them. However, when you delay patching your software or updating it on time, you make your company’s database more open to attacks by the minute.
4 out of 5 companies who experienced a data breach could have easily avoided the issue by updating on time. While patch updates don’t make your software entirely bulletproof, they can help mitigate most cases of cyberattacks.
Limit Public Wi-Fi Usage
Your employees may want to work in public, making them more prone to using free Wi-Fi. Public Wi-Fi connections are not secure. The online activity is not encrypted, and hackers can quickly launch a false hotspot posing as free public Wi-Fi. When an employee connects to the public Wi-Fi, the hacker can obtain information on their activity or download malware onto their computer. This can quickly corrupt your company database or leave it vulnerable to breaches.
While you can’t stop your employees from working in public, you can give them a VPN. This sets a private channel for your employee to work on while connected to the public Wi-Fi, upgrade your Wi-Fi connection. Over 90% of professionals struggle with data privacy, and a VPN can help. When your employee works through a VPN, the data stays encrypted, and hackers can’t track the employee’s IP address to send malware. This ensures employees can carry on working with no attacks on their privacy.
Check Your Logs
When you invest in better cybersecurity, you get to build an infrastructure that gives you access to security logs. These monitor all the activity happening in your database and log them. Unusual activity gets highlighted, which informs you malware was trying to gain access. These cybercrime tools are easy to detect since they don’t have your company’s unique credentials.
Being forewarned can help you take necessary measures to set up a more robust firewall and ward off attacks. You may even study the malware to check if you can track the source of the hacker. Having a security log is an excellent way to stay cautious and analyze how prone to attacks your company is.
Get in the Habit of Writing Strong Passwords
Some hackers gain access to your account by entering predictable passwords. With more than half the population in the US using their birthdates, gaining access to most computers is far too easy. Your company’s data is far too sensitive to get protected with a predictable password.
A clever trick is to create a very random password with special symbols and numbers. This reduces the probability of it being predictable. Ensure every employee gets their unique password which you can change every week to stay strong and unpredictable. Consider using a password manager to store all crucial passwords on a central database, making it easier to unlock all databases at once with two-factor verification.
Download Apps from Reliable Stores
You can download apps from anywhere, but you make your system more vulnerable to ransomware attacks when you get them from unreliable sources. Since ransomware attacks have doubled since 2021, you don’t want to become an easy target. Downloading apps with hacker tools gives them insight into your accounts and details, which can destroy your life. Avoid a significant mishap and use reliable app stores for your applications.
Conclusion
Cybercrimes are still on the rise despite cybersecurity becoming more advanced. While technology has advanced for good, it has also provided new tools to hackers. Unless you play it safe, no hacker will have trouble using these tools on you. Therefore, protect yourself and your company by discussing cybersecurity at length with insights into the psychological phenomena driving perpetrators.
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