Cybersecurity For Your Business: More Important Than Ever

Published On - July 16, 2020

Ayobami Ogunseye blog
cybersecurity

Cybersecurity has always been a cause for concern in the digital space. However, the menace of hacking, phishing, and other cybersecurity threats on businesses and individuals has become more amplified since the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a report from Deloitte, Deloitte’s Cyber Intelligence Centre, observed a spike in phishing attacks, Malspams and ransomware attacks as attackers are using COVID-19 as bait to impersonate brands thereby misleading employees and customers.

Most businesses have had to move most of their internal/external communications, marketing, and PR to the digital space due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the security lapses of most brands to hack and impersonate them in order to defraud unsuspecting people.

The Twitter Example

The most recent cybersecurity threat is the Twitter hack where the verified Twitter accounts of high profile individuals and brands were used to spread a cryptocurrency scam.

Victims of this cryptocurrency scam include high profile individuals and brands like;

Uber, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Apple, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, Cash App, Mike Bloomberg and others.

In only a matter of hours, over $110,000 has been sent to the Bitcoin scammers who coordinated the attack.

Twitter explained that the attackers were able to breach their system by attacking some of their employees with access to internal systems and tools.

Twitter very likely has security measures in place to protect its servers from cyberattacks. The attackers found a weakness in the security measures of Twitter’s employees and exploited this weakness to their advantage. In this day and age, protecting your website or social media accounts from cyber attacks is not enough. You need to ensure that your employees take extra steps to secure their emails, phones,  computers, and other work tools.

Practical Cybersecurity Tips for your Business and Employees

As seen in the Twitter example, securing your servers and website is not enough. Your employees are easy targets for cybercriminals looking to defraud your organization or infiltrate your communications systems. Your employees should, therefore, be your business’ first line of defense against cyber attacks.

Take the following steps to protect your employees and your business:

  1. Get a cybersecurity expert to educate your team about the various types of cyberattacks and how to recognize them.
  2. Depending on the email client your team uses, ensure they all enable Two-Step verification. Two-step verification makes it more difficult for someone else to sign in to your account. It uses your password and a mode of identification. This means you will be required to input your password and a code that will be sent to your phone number or your chosen method of verification every time you sign in to your account with a new device.
  3. Do not click on links or open attachments that come from email addresses or brands you are not familiar with. They may have malware attached to the link that will begin infiltrating your device as soon as you click through.
  4. Directly confirm emails from your colleagues requesting sensitive information via a phone call.
  5. Carefully examine email addresses from the sender before responding or clicking through. For example, if you directly deal with government agencies, ensure the domain extension affixed to the email address is a .gov not a .com
  6. Use antivirus Softwares on your laptops and mobile phones
  7. Install anti-phishing filters on your browsers and email client to protect your business from cybercriminals.

Implementing these practical steps will give your business an edge against cybercriminals. Want to read more posts like this? Learn what to do when your brand experiences a crisis here.