Incident Response

Cyber Incident Prevention Best Practices for All Businesses

Imagine that it’s a beautiful Friday afternoon, and that you’re getting ready to go home for the weekend. Now imagine that just as you’re about to leave your office, you find out that your email account has been hacked, and that critical data has been stolen from your business. Needless to say, your weekend isn’t off to a very good start!

As a small business owner, you may think that you’re “too small” to be the target of cybercrime, and that cybercriminals go after only large multi-billion-dollar companies. This, however, couldn’t be further from the truth. Cybercriminals know that small businesses are less likely to have strong security measures in place, and that this absence of adequate security layers will make it easier for them to deploy ransomware, steal data, and wreak havoc. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the steps you can take to protect your business from the claws of cybercriminals.

What is an Incident Response Plan?

An incident response plan is a set of tools and procedures that an IT service provider can employ to detect and eliminate threats, and to help customers recover from breaches. A well-designed incident response plan ensures that negative occurrences such as data loss, abuse of resources, and loss of customer trust are minimized as much as possible. Along those lines, our experienced team of engineers and IT support specialists here at Corporate Technologies has designed an incident response plan that is geared towards helping your team respond to any external threats to your business environment quickly and consistently.

While there is no such thing as a perfect and completely foolproof solution for preventing breaches and cyberattacks from happening, there are some excellent best practices that can help us greatly reduce the chances of your company falling victim to a cyberattack.

Now you’re probably asking yourself: “What are these solutions?” Corporate Technologies’ globally recognized team of IT support specialists can help you achieve this goal by taking the following measures:

Providing cybersecurity awareness training for employees Deploying the latest system and software patches and updates Implementing antivirus and antimalware protection Setting up and configuring a secure private network (VPN) Implementing Multifactor Authentication (MFA) Providing the appropriate backup and disaster recovery solutions

These are just some of the measures that we can put in place to help stop hackers from stealing your company’s data. Drawing from our 42+ years of experience as an industry leader in the areas of IT support and cybersecurity, Corporate Technologies has designed and implemented a Cyber Incident Response 101 protocol which consists of five different phases

1. Identify: Pinpoint security risks and threats to your system, data, and operations, among other things
2. Protect: Provide appropriate safeguards to protect your business, including backups, security controls (e.g. firewalls), and trainings that will educate employees on cybersecurity best practices
3. Detect: Quickly detect irregularities on the network and malicious and/or unauthorized attempts to access sensitive data.
4. Respond: Execute a detailed, pre-formulated plan for responding to any cyber incidents, which would include strategies for breach containment, investigation, and resolution.
5. Recover: Help your business remediate and recover from cyber incidents, minimize down-time, and resume normal business operations in a timely fashion.

A well-crafted incident response plan similar to the one that Corporate Technologies offers to its 1200+ clients nationwide will help you remediate any breaches that occur, minimize the damage caused by them, and restore normal operations quickly and effectively. To ensure that we are providing the most comprehensive and effective plan possible to our clients, our team of IT support specialists continually fosters and facilitates the plan’s ongoing evolution by updating the protocols and procedures that it consists of as new developments in technology, IT support, and cybersecurity emerge. This ensures that our customers are being serviced and protected with the best practices available.

• Protect your business against cyber incidents
• Create a comprehensive incident response plan
• Abide by NIST’s five phases of incident response

Also, to walk you through incident prevention best practices, we have created a checklist entitled “Cyber-Incident-Prevention Best Practices for Your Small Business.”

Please reach out to your Account Managers to ensure that you are utilizing all of the best practices and security features available to you, and in turn, allowing your business to have the best security measures in place.