The digital world has lately seen a sudden surge in the number of cyber-attacks in the COVID 19 era. In particular, there were several phishing attacks with the aim to steal valuable customer information or damage the reputation of a business.

In this regard, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has reported a major upsurge in the number of cyber scams that are carried out in the event of COVID 19. Several businesses and owners have been receiving phishing emails that can cause tremendous damages to business websites. Hence it has become highly important for businesses to secure their website against these attacks and scams.

One of the most unfortunate facts about this is, the attackers are more attracted towards the small business websites.  Most of the attackers conduct phishing attacks to get a business down. In such cases, it is important that you keep your website secure to prevent it from such attacks.

How to keep yourself secure?

One of the best ways is to carry out employee education. You should make your employees aware of such attacks and give proper instructions and guidance to the staff members to predict risks and report if they find suspicious activity. The second measure that can be taken is endpoint protection. This will put an extra layer of defence. At the same time, it is also important to apply endpoint protection to their business website.

At the same time, it is also important that small businesses pay considerate attention to the backup and recovery activities of the business. This might involve the right technology, people, and a good plan.

Many small business owners do not think about this option. As a result, most small business websites do not have a backup and recovery option. As a result, they have faced cyber attacks and loss of important business data.

Cloud Services Might be Limited

Most small businesses use OneDrive to store their data and information. They must understand that Microsoft or other cloud platforms are only providing them with a place to store their data. This is similar to the data or information that is present on the devices present on-premises, such as a laptop or any other device. In such a case, only the user is responsible for protecting it.

Therefore, it is the responsibility of the business owner to protect it or implement the options of backup and recovery. Even the data stored on the cloud is not secure and might face malicious attacks or even accidental deletions. Therefore, you need to keep a backup of all your data which will help you to roll back to a clean copy of your data. It is also important that you keep your data and information encrypted so that you can keep your business back on its foot if data is lost.

You Need a Solid Backup Plan   

The first step towards data protection is, knowing your data. Your data might be a part of a critical application or an input to the critical business application. You also need to consider how the data and the application are connected to the overall business operations or the overall business revenue generation. You might also need to consider if the data needs to be archived or resides in a legacy system. Lastly, how the loss of data might affect your business if it is breached.

• Develop policies to protect your data. These policies might differ depending on the processes and the kind of users for which this backup is being implemented.
• The second thing you need to do is to prioritize your backup needs. Identify the data without which your business cannot operate.
• The last thing you need to do is to continuously review your backup strategy. You have to consider and count if you have added new applications or data sources to your business. You also need to test your backup and recovery plans to stay updated and ready to resolve an event of data loss or a cyber-attack.

Small and mid-sized business needs to prioritize the data backup and recovery activities. For this, you need to work on the ongoing review cycles for your businesses. You also need to work on the backup and recovery options so that your business does not have to suffer in the case of an attack and get back up in no time.