3 Tips for SMB IT departments to strengthen their IT security strategy amidst COVID-19

A recent cybersecurity survey of more than 3000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) owners, conducted by Bullguard, showed that not many business owners are prepared to face a security breach and 60% of those surveyed believed they won’t fall victim to cybercrime. This combined with the impact of COVID-19 makes for a cybersecurity disaster.  For SMB owners to strengthen their overall IT strategy we offer the following 3 tips:

1. Secure your VPN

2. Practice cyber hygiene

3. Establish a business continuity plan

While the world is focused on the health and economic threats of COVID-19, cybercriminals around the world are capitalizing on this crisis. Cybercriminals are rapidly seizing opportunities to exploit the crisis by adapting their modus operandi and engaging in new criminal activities.

1. Secure your VPN 

With many employees working remotely, a VPN has become a lifeline to the company. Organizations should, therefore, ensure that their VPN services are safe and reliable as “a VPN breach is about as bad as you can get [since] the ability for someone to travel internally from VPN infrastructure into sensitive data is extremely easy, ” says Aaron Zander, head of IT at HackerOne. IT Departments should configure their VPN to balance the bandwidth required for the VPN server with the protection afforded to remote workers as a misconfiguration could expose sensitive information on the internet and expose the devices to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

2. Practice cyber hygiene    

With organizations falling prey to an unprecedented number of phishing attacks and cyberattacks, performing basic security processes can go a long way. Every SMB needs a clear cybersecurity plan that is communicated to employees regularly and includes routine network patches, operating systems patches, and ongoing security upgrades. Additionally, with a dispersed team, your backups and disaster recovery strategies are critical which makes a disaster recovery plan non-negotiable.

3. Establish a business continuity plan  

Many organizations have business continuity plans (BCPs), however, the impact of a global pandemic such as COVID-19 was not considered in many BCPs. Stage2Data now offers Plan4Continuity, including COVID-19 plans, to streamline your business continuity planning across any vertical as a live, cloud-based system.

The best defences against cybercrime have largely remained the same over the years. However, the COVID-19 pandemic might just be that extra motivation needed to finally get old vulnerabilities patched, change easily guessable default passwords, and strengthen IT security going forward. To support businesses and provide much-needed assurance and confidence to employees, we are offering “Return to work post COVID-19” plans powered by Plan4Continuity.