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Steps toward stronger cybersecurity for your business

More and more businesses, big and small, are doing business online. This can expand your reach to new customers around the world and provide greater convenience to customers and clients in and around town. But it also comes with risk.

Just like the “real world”, cyberspace has its share of unscrupulous citizens who will seek to trick and cheat their way into stealing things of value.

In cyberspace, customer and client information glitters like gold. And when hackers strike it rich, they impoverish the holder of the information. When customer, client or employee information is compromised, they’re left at risk of identity theft and an organization can suffer from lost trust. Aside from that, it’s an organization’s legal responsibility to protect the personal information it collects.

This means that today, any business needs to take steps to secure customer and client information from online threats.

Contrary to popular belief, most computer systems aren’t compromised or ‘hacked’ by daring acts of genius against which average Joes are defenseless.

Like a burglar who checks first to see if he can enter a home through an unlocked door or window before picking a lock or breaking a window, successful hackers often meet their objective by exploiting common vulnerabilities or “known holes.”

Some of these can be patched by non-experts on their own. Others, depending on a system’s complexity, may be best secured by an IT professional.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has made available a series of articles which call attention to the common weakness-points hackers seeks to exploit and some simple steps you can take to protect your business such as:

• Taking steps to secure your Wifi network;
• Making regular password and software updates;
• Encrypting your data;
• Keeping your guard-up against online impersonation; and
• Establishing and implementing an IT security policy

As every business’s systems and needs are different, they may not provide full solutions, but will serve as good starting points toward improved cybersecurity and data protection for your business.