A review outlines essential practices for UK businesses to enhance their online protection and explains the concept of cyber hygiene and its importance. This comes in the wake of 2023, when 32 percent of UK businesses reported experiencing a cyberattack at least once a week, with cyberattacks projected to increase by 15 percent globally.
Recent data reveals that 50 percent of businesses encountered a cyberattack or security breach in the past year. This is based on the UK Government Cybersecurity Breaches Survey.
In light of recent cyber threats, Milan Bosman, Commercial Director from e-commerce hosting provider Hypernode, has explained to Digital Journal about the significance of cyber hygiene for UK businesses and share essential practices to ensure online safety.
What is cyber hygiene?
Cyber hygiene can be explained as a set of practices to maintain system health and security in relation to a business’s online activities. Like physical hygiene, maintaining cyber hygiene entails a set of regular preventative measures.
Five key practices
Antivirus and antimalware software
Installing antivirus and antimalware is an obvious place to start for protecting against cyber threats. These tools help detect malicious programs that can compromise data. Viruses and malware are constantly evolving, so it is important to also keep this protective software up to date.
Be cautious of phishing
Phishing is a common cyber-attack in which criminals use deceptive emails, messages, or websites to trick individuals into providing sensitive information. It is by far the most common type of cybercrime, with 90 percent of businesses that have experienced at least one type of cybercrime falling victim to phishing. Awareness and caution around possible phishing scams is crucial within all businesses.
Back up and encrypt data
Backing up important data and storing it securely will be helpful in the event of a data loss or ransomware attack. Particularly sensitive data, meanwhile, ought to be encrypted to ensure it can only be accessed by authorised parties.
Secure Wi-Fi, strong passwords, and MFA
While seemingly obvious, these three simple steps, which are often neglected, are absolutely key to good cyber hygiene. Unsecured Wi-Fi networks are vulnerable to attack from cybercriminals who may intercept data or gain access to internal systems. Similarly, weak passwords are susceptible to being hacked. Strong, unique passwords that are different for each online account should be used. MFA (Multi-factor authentication) adds a layer of security to data and internal systems, keeping out anyone who should not be able to access them.
Educating all employees
Perhaps the most important point is that a business’s security is only as strong as its weakest link, and a cyber-attack can target any employee. Providing cybersecurity training to all employees is crucial to ensuring the security of a business as a whole.
