6 Ways To Safeguard Your Business From Online Fraud
Technology is the lifeline of the operations of a majority of businesses. There’s a good percentage of businesses whose operations are entirely online with no physical shops. Operating an online business or transferring some of your business operations online helps you reduce operating costs, lower time wastage, boost productivity, and improve revenues.
However, the online space isn’t entirely safe. Some fraudsters have swindled many organizations thousands of dollars. Cybercrime and malware attacks such as ransomware are on the rise. Therefore, you need to ensure that your business is protected from cyberbullies and criminals. Because cyberattacks are invented frequently, you may need to hire an agency dedicated to online fraud protection as they’re always updated on new online attacks.
To help you safeguard your business from online fraud, this article discusses six strategies that you can implement. These are:
1. Protect Your Bank Accounts
To begin with, ensure that you have separate bank accounts for your personal life and your business. This protects you from losing all your finances in case your account is successfully hacked. If your business account is registered to online banking, confirm that automatic logout is available.
Moreover, if your business provides credit cards to your employees such as fuel credit cards, ensure that you use a card provider with fraud protection measures. These protection measures may include alerts that you receive if finances that surpass a specific limit are withdrawn.
In addition, reduce paperwork financial transactions. This is because when you have a lot of bills to pay through physical means, your documents may end up falling into the wrong hands.
2. Secure Your Computers And Other Devices
Cybersecurity requires the implementation of secure protocols that hackers can’t penetrate. One of the measures you can put in place is having a sturdy firewall. A firewall is efficient in protecting your internal network from unauthorized traffic. Your firewall needs to have authentication measures that are provided to only the workers of your business. Using the two-factor authentication protocol in your firewall offers a better security measure to your company computers and devices.
Moreover, you can boost the security of your devices by installing an antivirus in each of them. An antivirus is efficient in detecting any attack before it’s executed so that your IT experts can take early action.
3. Transfer Operations Into The Cloud
Cloud applications are among the most secure working areas that your business can adopt. Clouds are online servers that provide unlimited storage space for all your business documents. Once your documents are stored in the cloud, you don’t need to worry about cyber threats. Cloud service providers employ top-notch security protocols that ensure your business documents are safe. Moreover, you can choose who should access the documents that are stored in the cloud. You can limit access to only the people within your organization.
Another service that you can get from cloud service providers is a cloud-based VoIP telephone system. Like other services, cloud-based telephone systems provide encryption to protect your business communications from being intercepted. Additionally, your desk phones can be locked to ensure that no calls outside the company are done using business phones.
4. Conduct A Security Audit
It’d be difficult to know if your network has security gaps if you don’t check out whether they exist. Therefore, you need to let your IT experts carry out an audit to identify the security weaknesses in your internet or website. White hat hackers are essential in this situation. This is because they’re trained to think like hackers. If they’re successful in penetrating your website, that’s an opportunity to patch your website and seal all weak points. Website weak points are the entry areas of ransomware and cybercriminals.
5. Establish A Business-Wide Password Policy
Passwords are critical to safeguarding your business. Employ strong passwords that aren’t less than eight characters. Moreover, use both upper case letters and lower-case letters. To ensure that your passwords can’t be easily guessed, include special characters. In addition, regularly change your passwords, preferably after every month.
Moreover, all company bank accounts, accounting software, and communication platforms should be secured with passwords. Again, all company employees should be advised on the importance of keeping passwords a secret without revealing them to other colleagues. Besides these precautions, your employees should use different passwords for each platform.
6. Beware Of Signs Of Online Fraud
Your business should conduct a company-wide sensitization and training to be familiar with how online fraud happens. Social engineering is one of the top ways that hackers use to get information from unsuspecting people. Therefore, your workers should be informed not to reveal company details to strangers or even anyone in the business who isn’t supposed to know it.
Wrapping Up
Online fraud is a threat to all types of businesses, not only e-commerce shops. Therefore, if you’re a business owner, you need to ensure that your business is secure from online fraud. As a result, this article is a masterpiece of security measures that your business can implement to be secured from online fraud.
