Your business must take a multifaceted approach to mitigating all of the latest online security threats.

Many small businesses do not have a formal IT security training policy in place for their employees to use. Because of this, your organization’s first steps to improving online security should be to implement an IT security awareness training program.

What should you include in your IT security awareness program? Focus on the types of attacks that might impact your business the most. Here is a list of the 5 most common online security threats.

Password Leaks

When websites get hacked, the databases that contain username and passwords combinations are commonly leaked onto the black market.

The danger with this is that if one of your employees uses the same password for their work computer as they do with a breached online account, a savvy attacker could potentially gain access to your network using stolen credentials.

Always require your users to update their passwords every 30 days and force them to use a combination of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters when creating a new password.

Antivirus Protection

All PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile devices on your network should have some form of enterprise antivirus protection.

Anytime a person connects into your network using VPN, you should force the VPN client to detect if an antivirus program is installed before allowing that PC to connect to your network.

Antivirus protection is relatively inexpensive and today’s latest products have robust features such as real time virus detection, antimalware protection and ransomware protection.

Encrypt All Hard Drives

What if one of your desktops or laptops got into the hands of a nefarious third party? How would you protect your organization’s private data?

With hard drive encryption, you can prevent unauthorized parties from viewing the contents of a hard drive without the encryption key or password. This means that if your laptop is lost or stolen, someone won’t be able to sift the data off of your hard drive.

Hard drive encryption can actually be performed natively inside of Microsoft Windows using the BitLocker app. Third party solutions also exist which will help you achieve ultimate data security.

Discourage “Risky Clicks”

One of the things you’ll want to add into your IT security awareness training is a process for discouraging “Risky Clicks.”

Perhaps there is a website in a Google Search result page that is questionable in terms of it being helpful to the end user. Sometimes these websites can try to infect your computer with a virus.

Create a process that helps users deal with “Risky Clicks.” You could implement a browser plugin that automatically checks all links for malicious content or you could ask users to send risky click URLs to a website like VirusTotal.com for further analysis.

Implement Content Filtering

Your firewall should be setup to filter out questionable and malicious websites from your end users. If users are able to freely browse to whatever website they choose, there is a bigger risk of their computer being hijacked by a virus or trojan horse.

You could create a ban list of websites or categories of websites that your users are not able to visit. You could also create times of day, such as the employee lunch hour, for users to browse acceptable sites that might otherwise be blocked during the user’s office hours.

Putting it All Together

Each of these online security solutions are affordable, practical and low cost. Best of all, your trusted provider of managed services can help you implement each of these best security practices.

If your business is able to master these 5 simple online security tips, your end users will stay shielded from the majority of online attacks. This allows your business to operate without interruptions which keeps everybody happy.