In contemporary globalized environment, security has necessarily become one of the most important issues for any company. As we observe more and more stages of technology development, every face digital risks and threats, and cybersecurity becomes an essential component. When it comes to cyber attacks nowadays, the threat is very high and the consequences of the attack can lead to critical results such us financial losses, legal issues and bad repute. In today’s environment where most organizations have embraced the use of technology, it is imperative that both large and small organizations incorporate the issue of cybersecurity as a key concern for consideration for any organisations to survive and thrive in such a competitive world.
1. Why is cybersecurity important for businesses?
Since organizations are progressively embracing technology in transactions along with business operations and data, it has become crucial to develop security measures for data. The phenomenon as cloud computing, remote work, mobile devices, and IoT has expanded is the set of opportunities for cyber criminals. This has policies and procedures exposed business to risk threats like data leakage, ransomware, phishing, and other cyber risks.
A survey carried out in the last few years estimated that an organization may lose millions of dollars, time, and sales as a result of a cyber attack. Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are particularly vulnerable as an infection might be crippling, reaching the point of closure for the business. For this reason, statistics indicate that approximately 60% of smaller companies fail after six months of a severe cyber incident.
However, the breakdown of exemplary punishments indicate that the business bears the costs of financial and reputational loss due to cyberattacks. Customer data breach means trust is lost, and recovering that trust takes efforts and time, possibly, years. Those organizations that do not safeguard their data enough can also incur legal consequences as more and more global governments increase data protection laws like GDPR and CCPA.
2. Popular Cyber Threats That Affecting Organizations
Cyber threats are numerous and varied, and their approaches and consequences vary across the business environment. Some of the most common threats include:
a. Phishing Attacks
Phishing is a type of identity fraud in which unauthorized people try to get as much information as possible under the guise of being someone else. These attacks can be in form of an email or message containing an invite to give passwords, credit card details or click on a link to a specified website. Phishing has not ceased to be one of the most common forms of cyberattacks since it relies on the human factor regardless of the level of protection.
b. Ransomware
Ransomware is a type of Malware that encrypted a company sensitive data and then demands a ransom so as to have the data decryption. Has become the most common type of cyber-attack advanced recently and impacted hospitals, city governments, and major businesses globally. Worse still, ransomware affects financial and operational turbines, and companies that have no backup are compensated for their misfortune.
c. Distributed Denial of Service attacks
DDoS attacks work towards the actual objective of overloading a company’s online services with traffic, usually locking down its websites or applications. These attacks can lead to tremendous losses, more so for e-business firms since their corporate revenue is in most cases gotten from their websites. Although it is is different from cyber theft, DDoS attacks bring severe consequences since the downtimes lead to massive losses.
d. Insider Threats
Insider threats happen when the insiders who have legitimate access to a company intentionally or due to negligence expose the business to risks. These threats may be hard to identify because they emanate from within the organization by people who have access to the data. Both with and without ill/vicious purposes, insiders are capable of being sources of leakage, theft of intellectual properties, and other security vices.
3. What Happens When Cybersecurity is Compromised
The impact of which can be a lot of impacting a business in various areas; they are known to cut across all aspects of business operation. Some of the key impacts include:
a. Financial Losses
A cyber-attack leads to a direct financial impact such as lost revenues due to remediation, attorneys’ fees, fines for non-compliance, all in addition to any ransom that might be required. Other costs may be less tangible, but sometimes may be just as, if not more significant, as they include lost contracts, time off, poor relations with customers.
b. Reputation Damage
The exposure refers to a high risk of damaging the reputation of a organization involved in a breach especially when customers are involved. Consumers trust business and companies with their data and when this trust is violated, the end result is customer attrition. There is usually a long time consuming and costly process of regaining customers trust and business after it has been lost.
c. Legal and Regulatory consequences
Prime ministers and other regulatory authorities have put in place strict laws to protect data belonging to companies. Those businesses that do not adhere to these regulations should expect to pay heavily in penalties. For instance, under GDPR organizations may be subjected to fines of up to 4% of their total world revenue or €20 Million whichever is larger in cases of a particularly severe infringement. For their part, businesses risk also the possibility of receiving law suits from customers who have been affected.
d. Operational Disruptions
They compromise business continuity through invasive activities such as denying an organization access to its systems or erasing its data or making its operational applications unresponsive. This can lead to a definite downtime, decreased productivity and thus a correspondent decrease in the revenues. In particular, such disruptions are rather long-term for companies that depend on computer-aided platforms for stigma operations.
4. Cybersecurity Policy Framework: The Implementation Strategy
Because of the constant evolution of the cyber threats, organizations have to approach security holistically. Here are some best practices that can help companies strengthen their defenses:
a. Employee Training and Awareness
People myself, for instance, are commonly cited as the most vulnerable component in any organizational cybersecurity strategy because people can be tricked into clicking a phishing link or let out compromising information. This practice should be conducted often to ensure the employees are informed on the emerging risks, fake emails and how to avoid falling victim to fake emails and measures that need to be followed to protect data. The following are key steps that make it possible to minimize human errors in security: Setting up security awareness culture thus, can go a long way in curtailing human error.
b. Ensure Internal and External Controls Pdf
An access control policy is particularly healthy in a way that it restricts any unauthorized person to gain access to most of the information in an organization. MFA, RBAC and enforcing the principle of least privilege are some of the ways to reduce the impact of the attack and prevent malicious persons from getting unauthorized access to the system.
c. Backup and Recovery Plans
The contingency plan as relates cybert attacks include backup and recovery of information and can not be overemphasized. The important organizational data should be backed up and stored especially when the backup copy has to be stored in a different location or on a cloud storage to be ready for use in case of a ransomware attack or a data leak. Like any other disaster management strategy, it is crucial to conduct trials with recovery plans on the same frequency to check their effectiveness.
d. Firewalls, antivirus and intrusion detection systems (IDS)
Boundaries such as firewalls and antivirus as well as Intrusion Detection Systems can act as barriers to unfavourable entities to gain access to a Company’s network. Such tools should also be subject to update periodically to counter a new batch of threats. Also, the data encryption makes certain that even in the event that data is acquired, it is in a format that provides no benefit to the attackers.
5. Cybersecurity in the Future Business Environment
AI, machin learning and block-chain are some of the technologies in the future that will define the cybersecurity. Today, AI and machine learning are used to identify threats and act in response to them in real time and with blockchain, data can be stored in a secure and distributed manner. Those companies that risk to invest in innovative security tools will be prepared for other future challenges.
However, businesses must stay on the alert because, as it has also been seen with cybercriminals, sophistication is slowly increasing. Policies, regularity of audits, and compliance with all cybersecurity protocols will reduce the threats posed by employees complacent in their approach to their work.
