Top 10 Best Cyber Security Best Practices to Prevent Cyber Attacks

Top 10 Best Cyber Security Best Practices to Prevent Cyber Attacks. Implementing cybersecurity best practices in your business is imperative to preventing cyber attacks and securing crucial business data. Proper security ensures you prevent cyber attacks before they affect your operations. 

Whether you are a business or an individual, you are at risk of hacking, ransomware, DDoS, Malware and phishing attacks, among others. Malicious attackers have sophisticated means to gain access and compromise data. Therefore, you should understand cyber threats and implement proper IT security to prevent cyber attacks.

Top 10 Best Cyber Security Best Practices to Prevent Cyber Attacks

Here are 10 best cybersecurity best practices to prevent cyber attacks: 

Enable Firewall Protection

Firewall Protection Help Prevent Cyber Attacks

A firewall filters the traffic entering your network. It acts as the first line of defence against cyberattacks. In addition firewalls prevent unauthorized users from accessing your mail, web and network resources. You can deploy firewalls at multiple points within your network. Importantly the firewalls are most effective when placed at network perimeters. They enforce boundaries between your internal network and the public internet.

The location of a  firewall at the network perimeter analyses the incoming traffic based on a set of rules. It only permits IP addresses from trusted sources. You can use Nextgen firewalls with threat detection capabilities. These firewalls can identify and block malicious traffic trying to access your network. With the defence that firewall provides it reduces the risk of attack significantly.

Implement Endpoint Protection

Firstly the Endpoint protection is securing end user devices. Typically, end user devices such as PCs, mobile phones, routers, storage disks etc are major weak points for cyber attackers. With more organizations shifting to remote work, employees have to access business systems using personal devices. Most organizations are vulnerable to attacks as most users’ devices aren’t 100% secure. 

Secondly Endpoint protection involves monitoring and securing user devices against cyber threats. It combines both device and network-level defences to restrict access to company IT systems.

To secure user devices, you can install endpoint protection software on devices. These software tools monitor devices for suspicious behaviour to prevent cyber attacks. They also filter malicious URLs to block access to inappropriate websites and prevent phishing.

Install Anti Malware and Anti Virus Software

Both anti malware and anti virus software help prevent cyber attacks. Antimalware protection helps prevent malicious attackers from impending malware in your IT systems. So antivirus protection deals with viruses, trojans and worm attacks.

With antivirus software scans your devices for viruses. Advanced software can scan your systems and remove the virus from your systems.

Another benefit of antimalware software is that it safeguards your devices from adware, worms and spyware designed to hack your systems. The software employs various techniques to detect malware attacks. These are:

  • Behaviour based detection.
  • Signature based detection.
  • Sandboxing.

While both antivirus and anti-malware perform almost similar purposes, anti malware tools are more advanced than antivirus tools. You can install both types of tools and schedule automatic scans and stay protected.

Use Multifactor Authentication

Multifactor authentication helps prevent unauthorized people from logging into your crucial business systems. It is an additional layer in addition to your password that a user has to pass before gaining access. It requires users to confirm their identity before accessing an online application. After entering the username and password, the user has to pass the identity protection layer before being granted access.

You can set multifactor authentication for personal devices, cloud resources, and applications. Multi-factor authentication can be a one-time password, security question, fingerprint, or cryptographic token. Users who fail to pass multifactor authentication are locked out.

Connect to a Secure Wi-Fi

Securing Wi-Fi is one of the cybersecurity practices to prevent cyber attacks. Wi-Fi networks can be hacked easily, leading to the compromise of the entire company network. Therefore, you should only use secure Wi-Fi to access the internet. If the Wi-Fi network is insecure, any device within range can use your internet connection.

To secure your connection, you should always encrypt your Wi-Fi using either WPA2 or WPA3 encryption. When using public Wi-Fi, install a VPN to protect your data. A VPN protects your information regardless of whether you are using public or private Wi-Fi. Moreover the VPN hides your IP address, masking your online actions.

Vulnerability Assessment

Vulnerability assessment involves scanning the entire IT environment for vulnerabilities that can lead to cyber attacks. It helps review any security weakness and the susceptibility of an attack. Through a vulnerability assessment, you can detect weak points and implement remediation or mitigations to reduce risk of attack.

Create Stable Cyber security Policies

A cybersecurity policy is a set of documented rules, regulations and processes that an organization uses to alleviate cyber attacks. The policies set standards for behaviour for activities such access of online accounts, encryption of data, use of organization’s resources, etc.

In addition cybersecurity policies lay out the roles and responsibilities of each employee, security expectations and guidelines when using business systems. Policies are especially important in large organizations and in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, banking, etc. However, each organization, regardless of its size, should have stellar cyber security policies.

Examples of cybersecurity policies include:

A proper cybersecurity policy helps implement proper security controls that can prevent cyber attacks. Also, ensure your security policies are up to date with the best cybersecurity practices like zero-trust architecture.

Security Training

Strengthening the human element is among the best cyber security best practices to prevent cyber attacks. The security training enables organizations to increase employee awareness regarding the security posture of the organization. You can train employees on how to detect cyber attacks, phishing email, etc. This increases the chances of preventing attack as they are aware of the nature of attacks.

For successful employee training, start with social engineering attacks. These are simulated attacks that resemble real security attacks. They help detect points of weaknesses in employees, and type of training to implement. Besides, you should implement security training depending on the role played by each employee.

Backup Your Data

A data backup is a copy of data stored in a separate storage platform for use in case of a malicious act or IT disaster. In addition to a data backup is helpful in the event of data loss or compromise. Another benefit is that the backup can be restored to resume normalcy and prevent business downtime.

Backups protect business from ransomware. Sophisticated ransomware attacks encrypt data, making it unusable. Unless you pay a heavy ransom, you cannot use data and this interrupts normal business activities.

With a data backup, you can restore data and maintain business continuity. You don’t have to pay the ransom as you have copies of your data. Always backup your data at fixed intervals to ensure you have updated copies. This way, you can alleviate a cyber attack that would otherwise be detrimental to your organization.

Password Policies

Lastly the password policies can help protect users against cyber attacks. You should always implement strong password policies to prevent unauthorized data access. Please utilize a password manager to help you with creation and management of passwords. Secondly the password managers help to create strong passwords and prevent unauthorized users from accessing privileged accounts.

Great effort! Thank you for reading Top 10 Best Cyber Security Best Practices to Prevent Cyber Attacks until the end. 

Top 10 Best Cyber Security Best Practices to Prevent Cyber Attacks Conclusion

To sum-up implementing the above security best practices can help you prevent cyber attacks. With the combination of these elements in place, it’s difficult for cyber attacks to compromise your IT systems. All you need is a proper cybersecurity strategy to protect your data, applications and network. As long as you implement IT security proactively, you can stay away from cyber attacks.

Read our blog for more cybersecurity tips like these! Thank you for your time.

Avatar for Dennis Muvaa
Dennis Muvaa

Dennis is an expert content writer and SEO strategist in cloud technologies such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. He's also experienced in cybersecurity, big data, and AI.

5 1 vote
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x