It is a known fact that digital marketing has numerous benefits, and hence it can be defined as a double-edged sword. It presents many business opportunities, but apart from that, it also opens doors to several cybercriminals. Often digital marketing needs businesses to process and collect more significant volumes of data about their users. Unfortunately, this information can also be used in malicious ways, which directly harms the customers and negatively impacts your company’s reputation.
Cybercrime is a real threat for medium and small businesses, and it can cost companies thousands of dollars. It is the major issue that all businesses face regardless of their size. Although most headlines today claim larger enterprises and businesses to be the target of cybercrimes yet, self-employed and small businesses are equally vulnerable. But, yet several SMBs are slow in implementing the measures of cybersecurity.
As per the study of a Cyberthreat, 73% of small businesses think that the cyber-attack happening to them is unlikely. Small businesses tend to underestimate the losses they will incur if they get hacked. However, as per AppRiver’s Cyberthreat, small-to-medium scaled enterprises are more likely to minimize the impact of cyberattacks on their business.
What is Cybercrime?
Cybercrime is a criminal activity performed via computer networks, internet devices, and smartphones, or other social engineering channels. A few of the most common Cybercrime include ransomware, phishing scams, computer viruses, data theft, denial of service (DDoS), and financial crimes on computer networks and systems.
Steps to Protect Your Business from Cybercrime
Given below are the five key steps you must take to protect Business from Cybercrime:
- Education
- HTTPS certificate
- Use VPN
- Protect critical assets
- Enforce strong passwords
Let’s move right into knowing each step in detail.
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Education:
Cybercrime is a global issue that affects many people every year. The data breaches are simply not happening because of evolving technology; they can be largely happening due to human negligence and error as well. One of the best ways to prevent this is by building awareness and training employees to deal with cyber security issues. Through constant training and awareness program businesses should encourage their employees to be cautious and create complex passwords for their communications and other security-related measures. Businesses can also ensure implementing necessary anti-phishing strategies as a part of their cyber security program.
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SSL certificate:
It is well known to be an encryption certificate that can encrypt in-transit traffic passing via your site. Apart from protecting your customer’s financial and personal information/data, the SSL certificate brings a few added commercial benefits. Let us explain how that happens. Many customers trust HTTPS (HTTP+SSL = HTTPS) websites and at the same time, the search engines rank such pages higher and boost the conversion rates.
Most enterprises depend on SSL to secure web connections over the internet. SSL certificates are available at three different validation levels, DV, OV, and EV SSL certificates. The strength of encryption offered by all three remains the same; the only difference is the validation level that the CA indulges in before issuing the corresponding certificate. For small businesses that do not have the budget to invest in an EV, an SSL cert can consider investing in an OV SSL certificate. An OV SSL certificate or Organization Validation SSL certificate is the best bet for small and medium enterprises that want to give their customers that extra sense of trust by proving their company’s existence in addition to domain ownership. This can be issued within a week at affordable prices.
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Use VPN:
The Virtual Private Network (VPN) tool is used to connect public and private networks by enabling the users to send/receive the data across public or shared networks. Furthermore, it shows that their computing devices are connected directly to the private networks with all the data encrypted, preventing hackers and making all the actions anonymous. Also, the users can access the internet from a different geographical location, which can be used if you must check the results using real search.
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Protect critical assets:
Having an HTTPS certificate protects your Business from Cybercrime. Apart from that, you must install some additional protection features for the business-critical assets like websites, social media accounts, and the logins of administrators. The two-factor authentication must be included that grants access after two pieces of evidence presentation (inherence or possession, knowledge). If your company’s social media gets hijacked for a short while, there is a chance of wreaking havoc with the business.
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Enforce strong passwords:
Having complex and robust passwords gives vital protection from Cybercrime. For example, according to the UK National Cyber Security Center survey, there are almost 2.3 million hacked accounts with “123456” as a password.
The top ten common passwords are:
- 123456789
- password
- 12345678
- 1234567
- 12345
- 123456
- qwerty
- 111111
- abc123
- Password1
The main features of complex passwords include:
- Replace letter with numbers
- Longer than ten characters
- Mix upper and lower case
- Add special characters
- Use phrases and whole sentences
It would help if you used a Password Manager for ultimate safety. You must know the cybersecurity basics as a digital marketing specialist to protect your clients and company. If you ignore these basic principles, it puts you and your clients and your company in danger and leads to reputational and financial losses for the Business. Apart from the above five steps, ensuring regular data backup and updates are essential for protecting your business from Cybercrimes and also preventing the possibility of destroying sensitive information. By backing up the data, you cannot be overestimated. To stay ahead of the potential vulnerabilities, making regular updates is the best way.
Conclusion:
Designing a website for your business is not complex in this technological era, but protecting the site is crucial. SSL certificate plays a vital role in protecting your website. Apart from the SSL certificate, following the above five steps will help you secure your business from cybercrime. We hope this article helps you. Still, if you have any queries, feel free to comment in the below section.
