6 Critical Tips to Keep Your Company from Becoming a Data Breach Victim

Data breaches continue to be a rising concern for companies of all sizes. Just the first six months of 2018 saw 668 breaches exposing over 22.4 million records in industries of all types.

At CwCastle, we believe in taking a proactive approach to business data security that creates a robust, well-designed security infrastructure. Our network security specialists understand that threats are always evolving, so we put a cybersecurity system into place that stays a step ahead of the hackers and prevents costly data breaches.

Some of the larger companies that have recently disclosed data breaches include Marriott, Starwood Hotels, Panera Bread, Facebook, MyHeritage, and Under Armour. But you don’t have to be as large as those examples to be targeted by a hacker.

Hackers often look for an easy entry into small business networks because they feel they’re less secure than those of larger enterprise corporations. And the news isn’t good for those smaller companies, because 60 percent of them go out of business within 6 months of a cyberattack.

So, what can you do to protect your network and data that also is affordable for a small or medium-sized business budget? Quite a lot.

More than half of data breaches are caused by human error or system failure, the rest by malicious intent and there are some straight-forward steps you can take to significantly increase your defenses against a breach.

Ways to Protect Your Small Business from a Data Breach

The costs associated with a data breach have been estimated to average $2,235,000 for small and medium-sized businesses, which includes costs due to damage or theft of IT assets and due to business disruption.

If you’re the victim of a data breach, the costs can add up quickly from:

Proper network security, which often comes through managed IT with a trusted provider, can help you avoid data breaches and their costs. Here are our tips for protecting your network and yours and your clients’ data records. Email Security Training for Staff. About 92% of malware is delivered via email, yet many companies don’t do regular email security training for their staff on an ongoing basis. Phishing, the use of disguised emails to get the recipient to download an infected attachment or click a malicious link, are the number one security risk for malware that can cause data breaches and virus infections.

Regularly train staff on the following: