Keep your company safe from the negative effects of cyber attacks on businesses. Across the world, companies lose millions of dollars every year to cyber crime. While there will always be cyber threats in a digital world, and case numbers increase as technology advances, you can take a multitude of measures to make sure your company data system infrastructure is secure. Beyond monetary loss, there are many negative effects of cyber crime on businesses. From reputation damage to human resources breaches, don’t let cyber attacks impact your business.
Effects of Cyber Attacks
Monetary Loss
One major impact of cyber attacks on a company come in the form of monetary loss. On their face, many cyber attacks are specifically aimed at stealing money or financial information from a business. Whether its bank account information or direct money wiring, these types of hacks create an immediate monetary impact on your business as they occur.
In addition to money directed cyber attacks, hacks to other areas of your business also impact the bank account. When private information is stolen or human resource data is breached, lawsuits can often follow. These result in lawyers costs, court fees, and potential payouts to those affected by the cyber crime.
Reputation Cost
Whether data is your trade or you deal in other areas, a cyber attack on your company can result in some distrust in your company’s infrastructure safety and reliability. Large or small, a breach in valuable data and information can result in a multitude of issues. If human resource information is hacked, company employees must be notified. This breach can often cause staff to feel as though their private information isn’t being well protected by your company.
Client data breaches also have an impact on your company reputation. If your company suffers a series of system cyber attacks, current clients will question keeping their business with you. Due to that loss of reputation in information safety, prospective clients may think again about trusting their data and information to your vulnerable infrastructure.
Productivity
Cyber attacks don’t just cost money, they also cost time and productivity for your company. A hack into your system can immediately impact your company’s ability to function. The most serious form comes with ransomware. Hackers can seize control of your software system and block all access to your IT infrastructure until a reward is taken. During this time, your company will lose all ability to function properly.
Productivity is also lost as security breach protocol takes place. Lawsuits, time in court, and resources used to notify and settle for those affects all direct time and focus away from the function of your business.
How to Prevent Cyber Attacks
Cyber attacks can come in a multitude of forms, so your security response needs to be just as varied. Take an active role in your IT department security measures to increase the safety and gain confidence in your system security.
BackUps
Safeguard your data and information from loss or theft with regular backups. Whether you choose to backup information to a hardware system, software system, or a remote, web-based application, creating duplicates and stores for your company’s valuable data can save your business if a cyber issue occurs.
Hardware and Software
The core of any IT security system is in a top-notch infrastructure. Investing in a sophisticated and detailed system dedicated to keeping your data and information safe from cyber attack can make all the difference when hackers pose a threat. Both hardware and software systems have been created that use a variety of methods, all aimed at impenetrable security for your valuable information.
Cloud Store Usage
There’s a reason the vast majority of businesses have recently moved to cloud storage for their IT storage solutions. Due to its web-based infrastructure, cloud storage can provide a variety of cyber security measures for your data.
To mitigate the risk of data loss when cyber attacks occur, cloud storage can perform scheduled backups of information, creating a safeguard for your data. These backups ensure your data is saved in more than one secure location.
In addition, cloud storage systems typically store data over a range of servers. This can make it more difficult for a hacker to gather information from your system and ensures your data is safe from software or hardware crashes.
Security Testing
The best way to gain confidence in the infrastructure of your security software system is to test its defense against real hacking attempts. Through a series of intentional breach attempts, known as penetration testing, you can learn the vulnerabilities in each area of your system.
This method targets each potential direction a cyber attack could come from and the level of involvement possible for each attempt. Through White Box testing, the intentional hacker will be given no knowledge of your system before the attempt to hack. This allows you to learn how an outside cyber threat would impact your security system.
White Box testing gives the hacker an in-depth introduction and information on your system. This can simulate a hack from someone within your company or someone who has gained knowledge of your security measures.
Grey Box testing lands in the middle of the first two approaches. In this series, the hacker is given introductory or low-level knowledge of the system they are hacking. This helps you better understand how someone could gain additional, higher-level access to your data and information when they get a small foot in the door on your company access.
The negative effects of cyber attacks on businesses cost companies money, productivity, and valuable reputation with clients. Keep your data and information safe from cyber attacks by investing in security infrastructure, regular security strength testing, and top-notch software.
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