How To Prevent Data Breaches

There are certain steps one can take to reduce the risk of information breaches impacting your ability to operate and eroding your reputation on the market as an organisation that takes the risk of information breaches seriously. Unfortunately, data breaches these days can be a little more extensive than your social media accounts being hacked. Malicious software like ransomware is producing more avenues of attack that can access the corporate and personal information of the organisation, with the far-reaching implications of a data breach a steep reminder to organisations. It’s vital in this day and age to learn how to prevent breaches and implement recovery strategies in the event of a data breach in order to reduce the risk of the leaking of sensitive data and sensitive information that may have a negative impact on your organisation and most importantly your staff.

Training employees to be aware of the potential dangers of a data breach so that they are able to prevent the leaking of personally identifiable information (PII), as well as know what to do if a security breach does occur will benefit your organisation in the long run. Ensuring that your organisation has a strong security posture and is well equipped with ways to prevent cybersecurity breaches is critical to the prevention of a crippling cyber attack. Establishing a strategic cyber security culture will promote peace of mind within your organisation, giving you the best shot at keeping your data protected.

Government agencies like ASIC and CISA continuously putting awareness programs for these cyber threats, but what can you do today to help reduce the risk of information breaches in your organisation? Well, that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

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Establish a Strategic Cyber security Culture 

There should be a resilience strategy against cyber-threats that requires an investment of time and money. These strategies help an organization to run a smooth business flow and help to reduce the risk of information breaches, ensuring that all valuable and sensitive information remains safe. 

1. Lead investments in basic cybersecurity awareness plans. 
2. Consideration of how many of your operations are dependent on IT. 
3. Build a platform of trusted relationships with internal partners and government agencies for access to timely cyber threat information.
4. Consider cyber as a genuine business risk.
5. Development of cybersecurity protective framework policies.

Awareness and Vigilance

The awareness of the basic cyber threats should be driven within the organization in order to prevent data breaches. There should be some activity readiness plans available to the staff, which can train the employees to protect themselves from the information breach.

1. Basic Cybersecurity training to improve the basic cyber knowledge, its concept, terminology, and activities that empowering cybersecurity best practices.  
2. Provide a ‘safe-click’ awareness program that encourages how to make better choices online. 
3. Provide better training against the cyber-attacks like phishing, and other malware.
4. Use safe and reputable applications and programs. 
5. Set strong passwords for all company accounts.
6. Hold Cybersecurity events through academic institutions and government organizations.
7. Be aware of external social engineering.

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Safeguard System critical assets and applications 

Information is the soul of any business. Knowing where this information resides, knowing what applications and what exactly networks store and process that information, is where you should start, and you should build security into, and around these. All systems hardware and software must be secure from inappropriate access, accident, misappropriation, viruses, and systems failure.

1. Enforcing secure and secret configurations for all hardware and software assets. 
2. Generating automatic updates for all operating systems and third-party software.
3. Gained knowledge of what is on their network. Kept inventories of hardware and software assets to know what is in-play and at-risk from attack. 
4. Eliminate unsupported or unauthorized hardware and software from systems. 
5. Processing email and web browser security settings to protect against unsecured emails and webpages. 
6. Driven application integrity and whitelisting policies so that only approved and classified software is allowed to load and operate on their systems.

Limited Digital Access

Ensuring your organization is giving access to only those who belong to your electronic networking. Sharing passwords or any other access to the external member from the workplace could lead to serious damage which can cause drastic information loss.

1. Manage who could stay inside the security ring of information.
2. Securely maintained inventories of network connections (user accounts, vendors, business partners, etc.). 
3. Practice multi-factor authentication for all users, begins with privileged, administrative, and remote access users. 
4. Granted access and admin permissions based on need-to-know and least privilege. Leveraged unique passwords for all user accounts. 
5. Developed IT policies and procedures addressing changes in user status (transfers, termination, etc.).

Data and Restoration Plan

Back up your data regularly, and avoid information breaches by defining the actions to be taken under stress, minimises and limits damage and quickens the response time for you to restore normal operations. The strategies and risk management policies that you have established must be updated on a regular basis.  

1. Reviewing the development of incident reporting and recovery plan outlining roles and responsibilities. 
2. Test it often to ensure conformity and effectiveness of the systems.
3. Review business impact assessments to prioritize resources and identify which systems must be recovered at priority. 
4. Always have internal IT technicians who can help internally to solve the cyber threat issues.
5. Form a Compliant team for an internal reporting structure to detect, communicate, and contain attacks. 

Conclusion

Even the best security measures can be corrupted with a simple cyber threat that enters into the organization. This is why it’s important not to become complacent when it comes to maintaining your cyber security systems. Make sure your organisation is proactive about learning to protect your information where it is stored, processed, transmitted and is able to identify when unauthorised access is gained. Organisations should always have a contingency plan. It starts with being able to recover systems, networks, and data from known, accurate backups. The strategy for responding to and recovering from compromise: plan, prepare for and conduct drills for cyberattacks as you would a fire. One must take cyberattacks and system failures as an extension of your other business contingency plans.