Small Online Businesses vs. Hackers: Essential Strategies for Protection 

Protect your small online business from hackers with essential strategies: robust hosting, updates, secure credentials, backups, and cyber awareness training.

Even if they’re exclusively brick-and-mortar, small businesses need an online presence to thrive nowadays. As if they didn’t face enough real-world challenges, being active in the virtual one comes with new security challenges.

What can you do to harden your small business against hackers and other digital threats? Here’s a quick rundown.

Partner with a Reliable Hosting Provider

Choosing a good provider is an essential step towards setting your online business up for success. They make SSL certification and installation easier, ensuring that your site encrypts user data and gets higher SERP rankings since it’s seen as more trustworthy.

Moreover, various security measures like web application firewalls and DDoS protection are included in your upkeep costs. They effectively deter traffic from malicious sources and ensure uptime even under high server load.

Maintain Regular Updates

While it may be a nuisance, maintaining up-to-date versions of your CMS and any third-party themes or plugins is essential for your website’s health and resilience. Hackers are constantly probing these components for weaknesses, which you won’t be protected against if you rely on older versions.

Secure Your Account Credentials

Maintaining a small business’s online presence hinges on numerous accounts. Your CMS admin account, business email, and online banking account are just the most important, but dozens more need to be as secure as possible to deny hackers access to your customer and private data.

Complex and unique passwords for each account are a must. They’re also hard to come up with and remember. It’s best to use a password manager to automate their creation and secure storage. Browser extensions like password managers for Firefox, Chrome, etc., also make autofill from any synced device more secure and can set up two-factor authentication for accounts that don’t have it.

Perform Regular Site Backups

Any disruption in your website’s uptime is bad for business. You can’t do much about server failures and hacks directed at your provider. However, you can minimize the damage and resume operations faster if you keep regular backups.

Optimally, you’ll want to follow the 3-2-1 strategy and keep one backup in the cloud and another on an isolated disk drive. That way, you’re protected from server outages, ransomware attacks, and even natural disasters, should they affect your place of business.

Take Control of Your Digital Footprint

Not all cyberattacks happen directly. More sophisticated hackers might collect all available information on you and the business instead and resort to spear phishing. Unlike ordinary phishing attacks, these are research-based and convincingly target individuals like owners and other higher-ups.

Consciously limiting what you share online will help keep your digital footprint in check. However, it doesn’t address all the existing information you’re not even aware of. Hiring the best data removal service available is more effective than acting alone. They compel data brokers to delete anything they might have on you, preventing sensitive information from being collected, resold, and misused.

Educate Your Employees

Whether through negligence, ignorance, or malice, humans are the weakest link in any company’s cyber defense strategy. Luckily, making them aware of even basic cybersecurity principles like password hygiene and recognizing phishing emails helps reduce the risks significantly.

Full-blown certification might not be in your cybersecurity budget. However, you can always keep your team sharp by sharing resources on the latest threats and conducting security drills.

Conclusion

While hackers are a real and continuous threat, small business owners aren’t helpless. Applying the above strategies and being in the loop regarding emerging cyber threats will make your business a much less appetizing target.