An entrepreneur’s mandate is to protect their business from cyber threats, whether in harsh economic times, competitive markets, rising costs, or regulations. However, what if the forces are beyond your ken?

Cyber-attacks are a growing concern for most organizations, ranging from healthcare to finance and e-commerce. Falling victim to these cyber-attacks could prove doom to your online business.

You could face a bad reputation with your customers at your essay writing service, financial losses, or even data breaches to limit your service output. Cybercrimes are estimated to cost companies up to $10.5 trillion by 2025. Therefore, it becomes a prerequisite for entrepreneurs to protect themselves against these cyberattacks.

Key Takeaways

Cyber-attacks can severely impact businesses of all sizes, not just larger corporations.
Implementing robust cybersecurity measures is essential for maintaining revenue and business operations.
Customer trust is vulnerable during a data breach, which can lead to significant client loss and reputational damage.
Staying compliant with data protection laws is critical to avoid legal liabilities and potential fines.
Proactive steps like regular software updates, data backups, and staff training can significantly reduce cyber risk exposure.

How Can Cyber Attacks Affect Your Business?

Most entrepreneurs feel cyberattacks only target big-money companies with huge financial power. However, times are changing, and cybercriminals are perfecting their attacks depending on the security level of your business. Hence, poor cybersecurity practices may leave you vulnerable in the hands of cybercriminals. Here is what your business stands to lose in the advent of a cyber-attack:

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Losing Revenue

One common aftermath of a cyber hit is losing revenue. You may need to indulge cybersecurity experts to restore your business while paying for damages and repairs at a premium.

Moreover, an entrepreneur can anticipate incurring other payments ranging from business downtime, audit fees, legal fees, and remediation. It might force an entrepreneur to pass on the costs to customers and investors, thus limiting the business’s stance in the market and its competitors.

Ransomware

One of the most common cyberattacks is ransomware. This is where hackers lock up your files, systems and sensitive data (holding them as hostages), in exchange for a ransom. Attackers can encrypt your sensitive financial and customer data in exchange for money. The ransom is usually hefty!

Often times, hackers leak all sensitive business data and financial information online, or sell it on the black market even when the ransom is paid. Moreover, ransomware can spread quickly through your business and affect multiple devices and systems. Regular ransoms, loss of revenue, and business downtime aren’t the only threats from cyberattacks. Solutions offering advanced fraud protection can help entrepreneurs defend their businesses against sophisticated online threats and ensure sustained and reliable business operations.

Losing Customers

Trust is an essential element in good customer relationships. When you buy an essay from a writing service, you’d expect to keep your personal information safe from the public. If you are a business handling sensitive customer information, the last thing you want is your customer’s data to land in the hands of threat actors.

This negatively affects your relationship with your customers. Moreover, it erodes and damages your business’ reputation in protecting users’ sensitive data. This may end up in you actually losing customers.

Reputation Damage

Each time a high-profile cyberattack happens to an established brand, it’s bound to attract media attention. The wide coverage online only paints your business in a bad light. It becomes hard to attract customers due to your online reputation.

Moreover, it deters away any potential investors due to the poor online reputation associated with your brand. A B2B SAAS SEO agency can play a crucial role in mitigating these issues by enhancing your online presence and reputation through strategic SEO practices.

Legal Liabilities

Each country has invoked data protection laws that require an organization to manage the security of all personal data. Therefore, if the data is deliberately or unintentionally compromised due to failure to employ security measures, you’d likely face legal fines and regulatory sanctions.

Moreover, further inquiries from legal authorities might result in government audits and lengthy regulatory investigations that might result in criminal liability.

Cyber Security Tips for Entrepreneurs

We’ve established that cyberattacks can affect the lifeline of any business. How do you prepare yourself for these attacks? Here are some precautionary steps to avoid falling victim to these hackers:

Updating Software

Your business’s bare minimum security measure should be updating your anti-spyware and anti-virus software. Most businesses are heavily investing in secure networks with firewalls and data encryption.

Hackers are constantly on the lookout for computer networks with outdated security protection. Therefore, always check regularly to ensure your systems are running on up-to-date software. This includes keeping your financial reporting tools and other critical business systems up-to-date.

Data Encryption

Encryption is a safeguard that turns plain text into an unreadable format with complex algorithms. Hackers cannot decipher any encrypted data without the encryption key. This renders it useless even when landing in the hands of hackers.

Most cyberattacks exploit any vulnerabilities in digital systems to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. Therefore, encrypting data prevents any unauthorized extraction of valuable information, leading to a data breach.

Regular Data Backups

A data backup system is essential for protecting your business’ data against human error, power outages, and virus attacks. A data backup copies scanned data and other relevant business information in case of a breach.

Regular data backups, secure payment methods, and the use of technologies like QR codes can further help safeguard your business against cyber threats by reducing vulnerabilities in everyday operations. For instance, companies can create a QR code for a document to provide employees with secure and quick access to important files while minimizing data exposure and unauthorized access.

Moreover, you can easily perform a data backup either manually or remotely. There are cloud services and remote storage facilities that secure business data.

Training Staff

Your employees are in constant contact with sensitive data when handling customers. Any negligence on your employees’ part can result in heavy losses. Therefore, cyber security training is essential to helping your staff understand any underlying cyberattack risks and threats.

The training provides them with prerequisite knowledge to identify any pitfalls for cyberattacks. Also, it equips your staff with skills to identify common tactics such as phishing emails. It minimizes the chances of a potential attack.

Installing Firewalls

A firewall is a network security system that monitors your network traffic to prevent malicious traffic while allowing useful traffic to flow through. Firewalls can serve as a preliminary defense that protects your business’ network from unauthorized access to private data.

Firewalls are proactive, allowing your employees to continue surfing the internet with more security. It automatically filters out any potential threats on your computer networks. This provides an enhanced security level for any vulnerable networks.

Cyber Insurance

Cyber insurance helps your business recover from financial losses due to cyberattacks. Cyber insurance policies cover any financial losses a business incurs from cyber incidents.

There are different claims under the cyber insurance policy, including costs incurred, losses, and other related liabilities. Compensation occurs after a full forensic investigation of computer systems and obtaining legal advice. Integrating a digital sales room into your business strategy can further mitigate risks by providing a secure, controlled environment for engaging with clients and sharing sensitive documents, complementing your cyber insurance policy protection.

Final Words

In practice, there is no foolproof method for saving your business against online threats. However, prevention is always better than cure – and in this case, remediation. In the same way, PowerDMARC has been in the email security industry, helping hundreds of new businesses scale their protection against phishing and spoofing attacks with DMARC. Our hosted email authentication solutions are a breeze to implement and are ideal for entrepreneurs who rely on email for their day-to-day business communications. Contact us today to learn more!

About
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Ahona Rudra

Domain & Email Security Expert at PowerDMARC

Ahona is the Marketing Manager at PowerDMARC, with 5+ years of experience in writing about cybersecurity topics, specializing in domain and email security. Ahona holds a post-graduation degree in Journalism and Communications, solidifying her career in the security sector since 2019.

How Entrepreneurs Can Protect Their Businesses from Cyber Attacks