How to prevent cybercrime affecting your business success

Unfortunately, on top of all the other problems you have to deal with day in, day out as a business owner, you also have to contend with cybercrime. As your organization grows, so does the target on its back in this instance, which is why you need to take cybercrime prevention seriously. Fail to do so, and your business success will just continue to be affected over and over again.

To find out how you can prevent cybercrime, be sure to read on.

Invest in threat defense

Threat defense is vitally important in the fight against cybercrime. If you do not invest in this kind of software, you give cybercriminals easy access to all of your important business data. What they then do with your data — whether they delete it for fun or hold you to ransom for its safe return — is completely up to them.

There are many threat defense programs out there on the market today, but none are as secure as McAfee. If you use the cloud regularly, especially, this is the kind of defense you should consider investing in. It extends threat protection from device to platform, which means it deals with data loss prevention on a larger scale than most other defense systems.

Encrypt your emails

If you don’t shore up your emails by encrypting them, cybercriminals are going to have a field day when it comes hacking into your personal data and private details. Encryption is basically just another layer of protection, and most of the time it will prove tricky enough to deter cybercriminals.

Fortify your passwords

You should make it a rule in your workspace that all passwords need to be as strong as they possibly can be. No surnames, birthdays, or ‘1234’ — if you want to prevent cybercrime affecting your business, you need to make sure that all the passwords you and your employees use are fortified.

To create passwords that are strong yet easy to remember, you should:

• Use a minimum of 12 characters every time you set a new password
• Make sure to mix it up and include lower-case letters, uppercase letters, symbols, and numbers
• Don’t make obvious letter substitutions, such as replacing ‘o’ with ‘0’
• Never reuse passwords — try to keep everything original
• Don’t write passwords down or share them with others

Educate your employees

Even if they are doing so without realizing, your employees could be the ones that are allowing cybercrime to affect your business. Unbeknownst to them, they could be doing anything from opening phishing emails on your company computers to accessing dangerous apps while connected to your office Internet connection.

Quite simply, you need to educate your employees all about the dangers of cybercrime before any more damage is caused. Here are some of the things you should be teaching them:

Cybersecurity threats come in all shapes and sizes, so they constantly have to be on the lookout for them

As stated, password security is essential

External links need to be treated with care — if they don’t look genuine, don’t click on them

Certain mobile apps can be dangerous when accessed on a shared connection