Cybersecurity-What Financial Exec’s Need to Know

Data breaches cause widespread havoc across an organization. Because a breach’s impact is so significant it’s imperative to implement across-the-board cybersecurity policies for all departments.

Data breaches steal precious time and resources from the day-to-day functions of a business, costing firms a significant amount of money to identify, contain and remedy. Compromising customer’s information also affects your insurance costs and can chip away at a brand’s hard earned reputation and relationships with its customers. A business can spend an inordinate amount of time repairing the damage-both financially and publicly-resulting from a data breach.

Statistics are startling. The Verizon 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report found that healthcare, hospitality and foods services, and the public sector had the highest amount of data breaches in 2017. But all industries – from financial services to education and manufacturing – were adversely affected. And don’t forget the small businesses. Breaches aren’t just a large enterprise problem. In 2017, 58% of data breach victims were small businesses. Large or small, companies of all sizes and in all industries need to be aware of their security risks and vulnerabilities.

Best practices for Financial Executives:

There are several precautions and actions organizations should take to protect their information and prepare their employees and systems for potential cyberattack:

• Multi-factor authentication: Once a hacker steals an employee’s login credentials, they can spread a virus throughout a company’s systems. To prevent the spread of viruses to other parts of a network, businesses should implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access systems, adding an additional layer of security.
• Employee security awareness training: Employees are a firm’s greatest asset but they can also be a liability as phishing continues to be a dominant method of attack. Offer consistent security training for all employees to lessen the effectiveness of phishing attempts and reinforce best-practices like shredding confidential information. Also, provide employees with a quick and easy way to report phishing attacks and other suspicious cyber incidents.
• Keep data “need to know:” Keep highly sensitive and secret data – such as financial information – separate from the rest of your network. Restrict data access to individuals who absolutely require it to do their jobs and routinely monitor employee access to determine if the data is being copied, moved or accessed in a suspicious manner.
• Backup your data: Make routine backups of important information. In the event of a ransomware attack, a recent backup of your critical data and assets could mean the difference between a crippling delay in business and a relatively painless return to business-as-usual.
• Monitor network usage for suspicious behavior: Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which flood the bandwidth of a system to overload it, continue to be a significant problem in many industries. Have a DoS protection service and monitor your daily usage to prepare for spikes in traffic that are indicative of larger than normal legitimate usage.

Cyberattacks are unfortunately part of doing business in the digital world and don’t appear to be going away as attackers continuously evolve their methods to evade detection and work around sophisticated security measures. Keep your business and reputation protected.

If you need assistance with cybersecurity give DarkHound a call at 714-463-6145 or contact us at [email protected]