5 Cybersecurity Tools Small Businesses Must Be Aware of
July 30, 2018
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has recently announced that the time has now come to scale up its Taxpayer Authentication Efforts. After the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shed a light on the issues, made some recommendations and suggested some areas of improvement in its new report, the IRS agreed with it.
Cybersecurity is one of the most popular threads not only among the authorities but among taxpayers as well. Because small businesses owners usually don’t have enough time or effort to invest in cybersecurity, many cyber criminals view them as a soft target. In fact it doesn’t require too resources: careful consideration will help you to protect your information from theft. The more you are equipped with this knowledge, the less time, effort and resources you will spend to handle any security-related incident.
It may be difficult to believe, but hackers mostly rely on mistakes made by regular people. Hold a cybersecurity training to your employees for them to learn the basic rules. Anyone who has access to your business’s information should definitely know how to protect the sensitive data.
- Install and activate firewalls
Firewalls – hardware or software – help protect your computer or network against unwanted traffic. Hardware-based firewall is a unit that is connected between the network and the computer. Software firewall usually is included in the operating system. But you may also download it from a reliable internet source.
- Remember about the passwords security
Passwords are usually easily cracked by hackers. Create passwords that can withstand the attacks. Ideally, each of them would be more than 8 characters in length, and contain a combination of numbers, symbols, uppercase and lowercase letters.
Encryption makes your sensitive business data unreadable for anyone not having the correct password or key. You can encrypt sensitive documents, emails or even all of the data files you have.
- Patch your QuickBooks and HandiFox applications
Regular updating minimizes the risk for an attack. We provide patches and updates to our supported products in order to correct security concerns and to improve functionality. Please, check for them at least once a month.
Anyone should know these simple things about keeping security. If you want to get a profound research – please see the “Small Business Information Security: the Fundamentals” from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
