In 2024, the state of cybersecurity on the internet is in a weird spot. Because most people spend their time on popular platforms that they trust and access the site with HTTPS connections, the web is not quite the lawless place it used to be. However, just because the average user is better off does not mean digital crime is gone. While petty crimes on individual users are less effective, skilled hackers and cybercriminals have shifted to small businesses as primary targets for data theft, blackmail, and other forms of exploitation.
While big tech companies still receive their fair share of cyber threats, the implemented security measures are always improving and do a good job of stopping breaches, making huge data leaks a rare occasion. For small businesses, especially ones that are late to digitalize, there are many vulnerabilities that can bring devastating consequences.
This article covers key protection tips for small businesses that lack cybersecurity measures. Here we will cover the most common forms of cyberattacks and what makes small businesses vulnerable. Keep reading to learn more about the successful implementation of security measures to protect small businesses, and their infrastructure, and the use of proxy server connections as protection software for external connections.
Understanding Common Cybersecurity Threats
Before we delve into effective solutions to guarantee business safety, let’s cover key tools and security threats that devastate small businesses. If your company has already suffered from cybercrime, having a basic understanding of how fraudsters exploit vulnerabilities in the future will help to strengthen your business and avoid future threats.
Phishing Attacks
A phishing attack is an attempt to trick the user into willingly giving up sensitive information, such as company or client usernames, passwords, payment information, and other private data. Phishing threats are often delivered via email to try and find gullible company employees, turning them into a critical vulnerability that unlocks access to the company’s database and the rest of the infrastructure. To avoid the devastating effects of phishing attacks, businesses conduct employee training that helps recognize suspicious links, and fake websites and fill out forms that could send your information to cybercriminals.
Malware
Short for malicious software, malware covers all digital tools that aim to infiltrate the system to corrupt files and sabotage hardware. Most common types of malware are viruses, but there are also extreme instances like ransomware – malicious software that locks all devices and threatens to destroy databases unless a ransom is paid.
Strict Password Management
Weak passwords are the most embarrassing and incredibly devastating way to give access to your internal infrastructure to a cybercriminal. Again, by including strong password policy training and encouraging employees to create passwords with numbers, capital letters, and a mix of special characters, users are encouraged to create phrases that are much harder to crack with brute-force attacks. On top of that, standardizing regular password changes reduces those chances even more.
While password management may seem like an unexpected thing to mess up, most internet users use the same passwords for multiple accounts, as they are too lazy to remember numerous phrases. Fortunately, some tools solve this issue – password managers. By installing a trustworthy password manager on your device, you can auto-generate strong passwords and manage them in one interface. For extra comfort, password managers also offer a way to automatically fill out credentials on your logins, collectively reducing the need to remember multiple passwords to just one – the master password for your password manager.
Regular Software Updates
If employees follow through and take digital hygiene seriously, other mistakes include running your web servers and on-premise infrastructure on outdated Software. For example, skilled cybercriminals often look for outdated Windows servers to target known vulnerabilities in the system itself.
It is worth discussing the difference between Windows and Linux servers. While Windows is the most popular OS for personal computers, it is a closed-source software whose maintenance depends on the company, and its structure makes it an easier target than Linux servers.
Linux infrastructure implements much simpler and stricter permission control for all files within the server, allowing the system administrator to create the system with far fewer vulnerabilities. On top of that, even if somebody finds a weakness in an installed version of OS, Linux software updates are far more frequent, with plenty of contributors working together to keep the system as the best option for backend infrastructure.
While the Windows system is more susceptible to cyberattacks, hiring security experts, such as the ones found at https://www.guidepointsecurity.com, to perform risk assessments is a great way to prevent potential vulnerabilities from being exploited and ensure robust protection against evolving cyber threats.
Protecting Web Connections with Anonymity Tools
Once the safety of internal resources is taken care of, we recommend protecting outside web connections with proxy server connections or VPNs. By rerouting work connections to intermediary servers, employees do not have to expose the company’s public IP address, keeping all connections safe and anonymous. Private connections are essential for data-sensitive tasks like data scraping because they deliver more connection requests to recipient servers, which can flag them as suspicious web traffic and block your connection. On top of that, exposing public IPs to cybercriminals makes it easier to look for vulnerabilities and break into your internal network. Even for third-party connections to your side, it is a good practice to use a reverse proxy server connection that acts like a gatekeeper, distributing the incoming web load to appropriate servers and mitigating the effectiveness of infamous DDoS attacks that overload the server with connection requests to slow down or crash the system.
Conclusion
To protect a small business from cyberthreats, experts try to implement the necessary security measures at the same time as its infrastructure begins to develop. For quick and positive results, we recommend hiring IT security experts to conduct thorough vulnerability training, and then prevent other threats with strict employee training, strong access control, good password management, and other good habits, building impeccable digital hygiene.