5 Tips To Protect Your Enterprise From Data Breach

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November 8, 2021 Business

Data breaches have always been an incredibly troubling issue regardless of your industry. Not only will it force the enterprise to spend thousands on damage control, but it may also affect your brand reputation and customer loyalty. Not to mention data breaches are extremely common, so no enterprise is safe from its threat. Furthermore, data breaches can occur within a matter of minutes.

But as inevitable as it may be, there are several things you can do to protect your enterprise from a data breach, and that’s why you’re here.

How Does A Data Breach Occur?

A huge part of why data breaches occur quite frequently is because there are several causes of the issue. Below are a few examples of how a data breach can happen to your enterprise:

Insufficient Compliance

Security standards exist for a reason. Not only do they help organizations establish relatively strong security, but they can also tell a lot about the concerning issues in that specific industry.

If you’re operating a healthcare enterprise and struggling to comply with the industry’s security standards, you may want to seek help from HIPAA compliance consulting services.

Social Engineering

Social engineering refers to the manipulation of an individual or a group into performing actions that may divulge confidential information. For example, a hacker may compose and send an email to one of your employees. If the employee somehow falls into the hacker’s scheme and reveals their password, the hacker can then use this credential to infiltrate your system.

Outdated Software

Hackers are very much like most experts—they update their applications and software to keep up with the latest cybersecurity technologies. Unfortunately, unlike these hackers, many people tend to forget about this practice, which means that particular software will no longer integrate with new applications. This can lead to a lot of problems that often result in a data breach.

Weak Credentials

A brute-force attack is one of the many tactics hackers use to infiltrate a system. It involves consistently submitting countless passwords in hopes of eventually guessing correctly. It may not be time-efficient, but it’s a tactic that works every now and then, especially for platforms and systems with a lax password policy imposed on their users.

Privilege Abuse

Privilege abuse is when someone from your enterprise uses their system access for anything other than business purposes, which then provides hackers an entry point to your system. Basically, it’s when someone abuses their privilege, which then leads to harm for the enterprise.

Physical Theft

If your employee somehow got their device stolen, it can pose a significant risk to your enterprise, especially if that particular device contains information concerning your system.

Protecting Your Enterprise

As you can see, a data breach can stem from even the slightest mistake of your employees. Naturally, if you intend to protect your enterprise from data breaches, one approach you can take is to prevent these scenarios from taking place in the first place. You can do so with the following tips:

1. Comply To Cybersecurity Standards In Your Area

Cybersecurity standards can be defined as a set of rules and guidelines that organizations in a specific industry must follow to do a particular task. For example, in many industries, organizations must adhere to the guidelines provided by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for them to accept payments. You can think of it as a minimum requirement in the industry.

While it’s quite bothersome to some people, complying with these standards is an effective way of preventing any instances of a data breach as it ensures data security.

Below are a few examples of security standards in various industries:

ISO 27001 (International Organization for Standardization)
HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority)
PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

2. Perform Software Updates And Patches Regularly

It’s a well-established fact that modern software has a short lifecycle. If one doesn’t keep updating it, that software may suffer from reduced security. As such, it’s advisable to perform software updates and patches regularly. The same applies to your operating systems.

3. Organize Security Training For Employees

Social engineering is perhaps the most difficult issue to resolve that may lead to data breaches. After all, unless you’re micromanaging your employees, they may still fall prey to social engineering attacks.

Still, you can at least minimize the possibility of your employees falling into these schemes. And what better way to do that than by organizing a security awareness program for your workers.

Here’s a list of the topics you can include in this training program:

It may cost you quite a bit to organize this training, but the payoff is often worth the expense. But take note that these programs must be ongoing and consistent to ensure optimal results.

4. Install Remote Control Software For Devices

In the case of physical theft, there’s not much you can do to prevent it, apart from telling your employees to keep their devices safe. You can, however, place a countermeasure in case it happens.

One tactic to prevent a data breach from happening due to physical theft is using remote access and control. For example, if one of your employees lost their device, you can use the remote-control software to completely wipe the data on that device. By doing so, you’re essentially eliminating the risks that the stolen device may pose. The remote-control software can also help with other things such as finding lost devices in the workplace or sending a notification to an employee.

5. Enforce Strong Password Policies

As stated earlier, successful brute-force attacks occur simply because of weak passwords. For that reason, you must ensure that your system has a rather strict password policy.

Below are a few examples of rules that you may impose on your employees during password creation:

At least eight characters in total
A combination of lower-case and upper-case letters
Add numbers and letters
Include at least one special character (e.g., @, !, ?, etc.)

Final Words

If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you should know very well how much a data breach can cost you. One may even argue that the expenses from a data breach alone can cause an enterprise to go bankrupt. Hence, while it might be pretty tiresome to implement these tips and tactics on your security policy, you can guarantee that they’re worth it. Besides, who wouldn’t want a more secure system?