4 Ways to Reduce Cyber Crime in Your Business

Cybercrime is a growing problem, in the UK and around the world. British businesses lose more than a billion pounds a year to fraud and cybercrime. While the high-profile hacks might attract the lion’s share of the headlines, smaller businesses are also vulnerable to this sort of thing.

As such, it’s vital that we take steps to stop cybercrime before it has a chance to inflict harm. Let’s take a look at just how this might be done.

Secure Platform

Open banking solutions provide third-party financial-service businesses with access to consumer banking information and other financial data. This allows those third-party businesses with the ability to conduct transactions much more quickly and securely. This allows it to be used as an alternative payment method which is just as secure as standard online banking. The user retains control over which transactions are authorized and which aren’t.

Passwords

The passwords you choose matter a great deal when it comes to security. A strong password should be long, including both upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Ideally, you’ll want multi-factor authentication – which requires you to input something you know (the password), while at the same time presenting something you have (usually your phone) or something you are (a fingerprint scan). With each factor, it becomes considerably more difficult for a third-party to gain access to your financial information.

Training and Education

If your staff aren’t adequately trained in cybersecurity and how to ensure it, then your business is vulnerable. As such, regular training in how to operate is extremely valuable. You might provide this training as a one-off, with frequent refresher, and as part of the induction and onboarding process for new recruits.

You might focus your efforts on the kind of cybercrime that is most prevalent and damaging. Phishing stands out as particularly popular among criminals, as it doesn’t require much technical expertise – just an unsuspecting, naïve employee. Train your staff to be vigilant against the threat of cybercrime, and you stand a decent chance of repelling it.

VPN

A virtual private network allows you to securely send information over the internet, as though the two communicating machines had been connected to a private network. This is especially valuable if you’re operating a team of remote workers who need to send work in from home, and you don’t want to risk malicious third parties coming in and intercepting the data being sent.

VPNs come in several sorts. There are remote access VPNs, which connect users to a remote network, and there are site-to-site VPNs which effectively create a single large network encompassing multiple physical sites. The latter tend to be the preserve of larger businesses which operate multiple sites.