The Impact of Cybersecurity Threats on Data Protection: How to Stay Ahead

As cybersecurity threats evolve, they bring greater risks to businesses and individuals, making data protection a key priority. Understanding these threats and how to address them is essential to mitigating their impact.

With the right measures in place, you can reduce vulnerabilities and ensure your business is better equipped to handle potential attacks. A proactive approach can make all the difference in safeguarding your most sensitive data.

How Cybersecurity Threats Impact Data Protection

While most business owners and individuals may not think about the criminal side of the online sphere, plenty of innovation has gone into the development of different malicious software and cyber threats. As these threats become more sophisticated, they present greater risks to businesses of all sizes.

Cybersecurity threats come in many forms, which makes understanding them all the more important to data protection. Common threats you could encounter include:

Phishing Attacks

These largely comprise fraudulent attempts to access sensitive information by impersonating a trustworthy entity through email, SMS, direct messages, and other direct communication channels. A phishing email, for example, may imitate a bank or financial institution in the hopes of having the recipient provide their bank login details.

Malware

Shorthand for malicious software, which includes software like viruses, worms, and trojans. They’re designed to infiltrate and steal data or damage computer systems.

Ransomware

A type of malware that could encrypt essential company data and demand payment from the victim to decrypt it.

DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks work by overwhelming a targeted system – this can include a website, server, or network – with an excessive amount of traffic or access requests.

It usually works through the use of multiple compromised devices (computers, smartphones, tablets, etc.), known as a botnet, at once. When successful, a DDoS attack will make the targeted system inaccessible to other users.

Insider Threats

Sometimes, malicious or negligent actions by employees, contractors, or trusted individuals within a business can be the cause of a cybersecurity breach.

Social Engineering

Social engineering is another threat that can occur from within a company or from people who have ties to the company. The most common scenario is someone manipulating a staff member or someone familiar with the company into divulging confidential information that could be leveraged to gain access to internal systems.

Zero-Day Exploits

Zero-day exploits are attacks that target as-of-yet-unknown vulnerabilities within a piece of software or hardware. They take advantage of the fact that these vulnerabilities have not been patched and utilise exploits to hack the software/hardware and access sensitive data.

How to Stay Ahead of Cybersecurity Threats and Safeguard Your Data

When it comes to staying ahead of cybersecurity threats, it’s important to understand that it requires implementing several security measures, education, and regular data backups.

There’s no foolproof way to fully protect your business from cybersecurity threats, so it comes down to mitigation. So, what can you do to reduce the risks as much as practically possible?

Security Measures

Good security will always go a long way in helping you protect your network and securing sensitive data. Many measures can be taken, some of which you may be able to manage on an individual level and others that will require the expertise of IT professionals. These measures include:

Developing a strong security policy that provides clear guidelines on protecting data and step-by-step processes for responding to threats to reduce the impact of a breach. This will typically require the guidance of IT security professionals.
Use strong passwords and implement multi-factor authentication for all endpoint devices and programs you use. Multi-factor authentication goes beyond just a strong password and can involve security questions, one-time codes that need to be verified on a device, etc.
Have your IT team (or an IT security service provider) conduct regular security audits on your system and network. We highly recommend conducting two security audits per year, minimum.
Encrypt sensitive data both on a local and cloud-based level.
Ensure protection is active for all endpoint devices (laptops, smartphones, printers, etc.). Endpoint protection (such as anti-virus and anti-malware software) will identify and quarantine (or delete) any untrusted, compromised, or malicious software.
Your network can be broken down into smaller segments that allow you to isolate sensitive data and limit the movement of cyber criminals during a breach.
Zero trust architecture helps protect your network by assuming that all users, devices, and applications are untrusted until they’re verified. This can be set up to be a constant requirement or reset after a set amount of time (e.g. users, devices, and applications will require verification at the start of every week).

Many other security measures can be utilised. Check out our IT security page for more information.

Education

Staff education is a critical part of your overall security efforts and helps you fill in the gaps that can’t be accounted for through technology and monitoring alone. As all human beings are prone to make mistakes, it’s best to teach them the many ways in which hackers and cyber criminals may try to gain access.

Educate them on common online threats, such as phishing scams and malware, how to identify untrustworthy sites, etc; and how cybercriminals can breach systems through methods like social engineering or from the inside (employees, contractors, etc.).

Another important point of education in the current era is how artificial intelligence is being used to manipulate employees. This includes the use of deepfakes and AI voice replication to convince an employee they’re speaking to higher-ups within the company. Remind them of requests that no member of staff or leadership would ever put forward so they can identify when they may be being targeted in some form through AI.

Backing Up Data

Along with security and staff education, it’s important to regularly back up your data. This should be done both locally (onto hard drives that can then be separated from your servers/network) and through the cloud.

Besides the breach of sensitive data, a key consequence of a cybersecurity breach is losing a large chunk of data and not being able to restore it. This can severely impact operations and set businesses back multiple weeks or months if proper backups have not been made.

It’s critical to keep regular backups and to also automate these processes so you don’t end up in a situation where days, weeks, or months’ worth of data simply disappear.

Secure Your Data with Setup4

If you’re looking to improve your business’s cybersecurity posture, the team at Setup4 can help. We offer IT security and cybersecurity solutions, as well as on-site and remote IT support.

To get started, get in touch with us today.