With over 100 million registered domain titles and low cost of record there, the World Wide Web has opened its vast work. For example, billions of email communications are transferred every day. No limitations to record and low switching damages make the cyber arena a winning location for violent action. In particular, spammers, hackers, and “spiders” are all supporting attention to online companies. There is a lot of professional and fragmented information regarding cyber security, yet few (if any) have seen it regularly. Thus, this post is dedicated to introducing cybersecurity requirements to business owners:
1. Network Matter
Intra-office and new office networking among computers and servers are hot spots for cyber attackers. Make sure that you tie up your network security as any lesser network security exposure can jeopardize your whole company information.
2. Physical Security
As it is clear, many companies still operate with obsolete physical security systems and poor staff training programs.
3. Database Hacking
Monitoring the people who maintain and manage your database is extremely important. It is preferable to set different roles, each of which grants specific database access privileges to the employee.
4. Application Server Attacks
- There are five things to protect your server:
- Be sure to set up and test redundancy servers properly
- Create a routine backup as a second habit
- If you have your server, define various roles and server access privileges
- Periodically check your server logs for any unusual activities
- Ensure that the server firewall and server load balancer (if you have one) is properly installed.
5. Mail Server Hacking
Sometimes attackers can hack your mail server and spam, or disorganize others, such as mails that will be sent to you. For example, a hacker may send fake emails to all of your users and ask them to change their username and / or password in an attempt to hijack their account credentials. Since users reportedly receive emails on behalf of your company, they will be ready to trust it and share their information.
6. DNS Attack
Although domain name server (DNS) attacks are not common, their amount of damage is deep. Can you imagine, for example, that for an hour, your users will not have access to your website, or worse, they will redirect the webpage to an attacker phishing?
7. MITM Attacks
Data security is an essential part of any security policy. If there is a lack of data security, hackers can perform a man in middle attack between the server and the desktop. To avoid such attacks, an SSL certificate plays an important role. It authenticates the website domain and ensures users that they are dealing with the right website. A site owner can get a cheap wildcard SSL if the website is eCommerce or running on subdomains. Such a certificate saves the cost and offers a single security solution for subdomains.
8. Admin Account Protection
Many serious applications, or large websites, come with an administrator portal where company employees can log in and manage the website and/or mobile app content. To secure account security, you must have:
A separate layer of administrator access privileges based on organizational rank and experiences
- Secure administrator authentication where all employees of the company contact the chief IT administrator if they have forgotten their password
- Secure registration where all employees must be registered in the system as safely as possible. In other words, it is pre-determined to see the registration form or signup of employees in online search results
- Restrictions against search engines where not all admin pages have to be crawled and indexed by search engines, which can easily be done by adding an administrator to your robots’.txt file to your rejected directory list.
- Staff activity monitoring was for very sensitive admin platforms, it is better to keep track of employees’ activities on which page they visited, in which frequencies, etc.
- Valid IP / MAC address verification where you verify IP or MAC addresses before showing the login form to company employees. This simple approach will make the work of hackers very difficult.
9. Forgot Password Compromise
Sometimes attackers try to sneak into your system through fake forgotten password attempts. Here are four ways:
- Calculate total attempts and lock the user account after certain attempts
- Use multiple password recovery options, like combining cell phone and email address verification
- Make sure your forgotten password form can detect “spiders” or robot submissions
- After the user password is successfully reset, remind the user to change the reset-password immediately after the first login.
10. Brute-force attacks
Brutal-force attacks are primarily the countless attempts by attackers to break into the victim’s account and steal their identities and data, making it impossible for the victim to notice. The only remedy I know of is to limit the maximum number of login attempts (for example five) while saving each attempt in the database. After reaching this limit, you will lock the user account, and the user will have to contact the system administrator for account reactivation.
11. Session Hijacking
Session hijacking is an attack that many programmers and business owners should know about. After a user successfully logs into your system, they are assigned a unique session ID for ease of tracking. However, if attackers capture the user’s session ID, they can hijack the user’s accounts and conduct transactions on behalf of the user, specifically through the shopping cart.Therefore, it is a good practice to logout users after a certain time of inactivity and properly destroys their session data.
What was discussed are the first, yet fundamental areas of cyber security management that are endangering many businesses within the next five years? Last but not least, the full implementation of cyber security initiatives requires an in-depth understanding of business processes and overreaching master plans.Indeed, as always, the strength of a chain is measured by its weakest link, so be sure to consolidate all your system weaknesses and draft updated contingency plans for catastrophic events.
