How SMBs Can Protect Themselves From Cyber Warfare

Innovation How SMBs Can Protect Themselves From Cyber Warfare Brent McCarty Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jun 16, 2022, 06:45am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Brent McCarty is president of ESET .

getty As the world undergoes global conflict, with continuing cyber threats a looming possibility, business owners may be wondering, “How will this affect me?” Attacks during these times usually target specific regions or organizations within involved nations. But that doesn’t mean these attacks won’t happen here and that they won’t affect a wide range of businesses. With threats on the horizon—whether they materialize or not—what can you as a small business do at a time like this? There are a few things you can do.

First, every business should have a cyber resiliency plan in place. If you are a small business and there is a disruption to your power supply due to a cyberattack, how will you continue to conduct business? With a robust cyber resiliency plan, business owners will be better equipped to handle turmoil and quickly respond to an attack. A good cyber resilience plan should include: Processes Start your plan by identifying your critical assets and measuring the impacts and risks to your business should an attack occur.

Areas that should be looked at include data security, access control, endpoint and system security, network security, physical security, application security, third parties, business resilience and remote work. Audit these areas and assess the risk therein, if any. Additionally, get management buy-in and create a crisis communication plan that management understands and knows how to implement on short notice.

Prediction And Protection Any business should maintain a constant state of preparedness against attacks. Understand the myriad of threats that exist—from business email compromise (BEC) and DoS—how they work and how they will affect your business. Have visibility into the health and integrity of your systems and put your preparedness to the test with simulated attacks.

A managed service provider (MSP) can help you understand your weaknesses, get employees trained on cybersecurity awareness and work with you on protecting your assets. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Detection Implement a detection strategy with security intelligence and a method for continuing business functions while your business may be under attack. Change processes and capabilities to reduce the impact of attacks.

Response Have a response plan in place and ensure it is ready to provide quick action against any cyber incident. The plan should include knowing how to recognize that an attack is taking place or has already happened, whom to contact internally and externally, how to mitigate the attack so it doesn’t spread and disrupt business operations and post-incident analysis. Recovery Identifying the resources needed, which parts of the infrastructure are a priority and how to operate the business during recovery should all be planned prior to an incident.

Documenting them will speed recovery. Also, the collection of data about the incident, the steps that were taken and the effectiveness of such steps will provide valuable information for revising and refining the plan for potential future incidents. Next, look through all your network resources for areas where someone could launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, an attack that brings an amount of traffic to your website that your network is unable to handle.

If you have a subscription page or a sign-up page or anything that requires user input, an attacker can potentially enter script on those pages over and over again, flooding your network and rendering it inoperable and inaccessible to both your network’s operators and your customers. You can prevent this by protecting the interactions on your website—using a captcha, which can’t be scripted, can also do the same. Other ways to protect against DoS attacks include using a service provider for hosting that has built-in technologies that provide DoS protection (a content delivery network normally provides this by default); configuring your firewall to specifically protect against DoS attacks by, for example, dropping certain inbound connection requests; and implementing service level DoS protection.

Finally, ensure everyone in your company uses multifactor authentication, one of the strongest and easiest ways to protect your internal and external accounts. If you haven’t already, now is also the time to start exploring and investing in a zero-trust framework . As recent events have shown, the world is in a precarious place, and we can’t predict what’s around the corner when it comes to cybersecurity.

Dire warnings from governments across the world should remind businesses to step up their defenses before it’s too late. If a cyberattack isn’t imminent now, it most certainly will be someday. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.

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