Building a business is hard but sustaining it is even harder.
No matter how powerful and efficient your business assets are, there will always be something that can disrupt the growth of your business. If not anything else, then the growing online risks and scams that your business is vulnerable to.
According to a recent Symantec’s internet security threat report, cybercriminals are broadening their targets. They are continuously innovating their tactics to commit crimes like identity theft and fraud. This makes business protection a key ingredient of your sustainable growth.
But the problem is cyber threats are stealthy in nature and thus tricky to detect. However, there is nothing that a little strategic approach can not resolve.
In this blog post, we guide you to detect key cyber threats like identity thefts and the best practices to defend your business from them in 2021.
4 Events that indicate that your company is the next target for identity theft
Let’s start with acknowledging a simple fact. Payday loans and identity thefts are a part and parcel of your company’s operation ecosystem. No matter how strong and efficient your digital risk management measures are, your business will always be vulnerable to such frauds to some extent.
The only thing you can do is create a dynamic and flexible risk management system. This should be able to respond to the real-time threats and vulnerabilities that your business is exposed to ever so often.
Cyber threats can occur in many forms. Ransomware, a data breach asking for money in return, identity theft to steal your sensitive information for malicious activities, and much worse.
A single identity theft incident can result in severe revenue loss, late payments, poor credit reports, delayed tax returns and disputes, lost business opportunities, and a company reputation that is beyond repair. This makes it all the more important to develop a 360-degree defense solution that could deal with potential cyber attacks.
In the following section, we take a deep dive into the four key events that can potentially risk your company’s identity.
1. Financial data breach
Financial data compromise that happens to global businesses every now and then. If your business operations happen to undergo high-frequency transactions, this risk rises even more.
Imposters and hackers can use this sensitive transaction data like credit card number, CVV pin, and name of the cardholder to perform malicious activities, make purchases on your name, and do many other activities at their free will.
Data breach not only compromises your business’s financial data but also your customer’s sensitive information. This could potentially break the spine of your business.
Here’s what you can do to avoid such instances:
- Keep track of credit reports
Monitoring your credit report is probably the greatest way to gain an overview of any credit that has been applied for and is still active in your name. Even if you do not get suspicious mail or notice false charges on your existing accounts, your credit report will disclose other indicators of suspected identity theft.
Credit monitoring and identity protection services like LifeLock keeps track of your credit card activities. They can also assist you to get ahead of any fraudulent activity faster than manually checking statements.
- Create real-time alerts
While keeping track of your credit report can give you a detailed idea of the flow of monetary resources from your accounts, this might not be enough. To ensure the fastest response against identity threats, having a spontaneous system is critical.
Creating real-time notifications for every successful transaction that you perform can ease this problem. This will help you to rule out the transactions that are authentic and the ones that have been misused if any.
- Limit your data collection
This measure is more of a prevention act than detection. Mitigating the collection and storing of sensitive personal information of your customers and your company can help you create a safer online ecosystem.
This lowers down the possibility of data breaches significantly. It might be tempting to save the credentials in your systems and frequently used sites for faster processing but take a pause here. You can still work your way around here.
Instead, choose to store your credentials in an encrypted limited-access folder and copy-paste the credentials every time you use them. This way you can keep both your system agile and safe.
2. Poor data maintenance
One of the key reasons why a company suffers identity theft is poor data maintenance. Data is no doubt the life-blood of any modern business. But all of the data will never be important for you throughout the business lifecycle. While some parts of it may stay relevant to the end, others will start to lose their importance as you move forward in your business’s journey. This makes data management so critical.
For instance, you might be having sensitive data regarding clients with whom you had worked in the past year but do not serve them in the current year. In such cases, a few of the details might lose their relevance and importance to your business. It is this unmanaged, least relevant data that can be misused by cybercriminals.
Optimal data management lets you access, retrieve, and store data on the basis of relevance and context for the best support. However, to do it the right way, there are a few guidelines that you should swear by.
- Multi-level protection
Creating a multi-level protection system for your business data access is one of the best ways to safeguard your organization. Use two-step authentications. Let your users log in with credentials that require entering an OTP (one-time-password) to access data.
- Create time-sensitive access
Creating time-sensitive access to your data is one of the best ways to ensure sustainable data protection. It limits the power of a hacker to dig deeper into your data files.
- Establish password hygiene
Establishing strong password hygiene can benefit greatly in keeping your systems safe. Ideally, a force notification for changing passwords should be done every 90 days.
3. Under-optimized protection
Data maintenance hygiene and alertness towards your cash flow is just one side of the cyber threats. The other potential loophole where you might expose your business to fraud is the way you deploy protection on your data. This makes deploying powerful fraud mitigation tools a prerequisite.
The following are some of the most powerful tools that you can use to do so.
- Utilize fraud management tools
SEON is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to fighting risks related to identity frauds. Providing fraud managers end-to-end control over scoring engines and risk thresholds, this tool enables rich customizations to work for your unique business needs. All of this is achieved via an API and a single dashboard with tools catered to every stage of fraud mitigation.
- Install a firewall
Configure your machine with a firewall. A firewall is a security device that helps you keep the hackers away by preventing unauthorized users from gaining unwanted access to the private data in your system. The modern-day firewalls do a good job of offering both client-side and network protection.
- Use encryption
Encrypt your data, including credit card, bank account, and Social Security numbers, before transmitting and storing it. This will not prevent a thief from obtaining the information, but it will prohibit him from exploiting it.
4. Under-optimized data policies
Policymaking might look like the least probable element causing an identity theft. But look closer. It is in fact the heart of all problems. If your data policies are not resilient towards the real-time threats of your unique business ecosystem, chances are you will have a hard time mitigating data risks.
Establishing standardized, documented data handling policies brings resiliency in the threat management system. It is like the major business health management protocols that can keep threats at bay.
The following are some of the best data policies you may want to integrate in your business.
- Establish a data collection strategy
Create a guideline to collect and handle business data for all consumers and stakeholders. This should be acting like a detailed guide book that gives a walkthrough to both from the high-level to the focused-view.
This should document the complete lifecycle of data collection, processing, storage and killing.
- Set record-keeping conditions
You can determine how long the company must keep the account and credit card data if the client hasn’t contacted them in a long period. Also, you can classify the data that can and cannot be stored under given circumstances to mitigate unnecessary risks.
- Get rid of any unnecessary data
Clear the account data of sensitive information that is no longer required for the account. Do not mention your SSN, driver’s license, or date of birth.
Final thoughts
Identity theft is unfortunately the reality of modern-day businesses. There is no policy or tool that can uproot it completely from the ecosystem. But you can certainly curb down the risks and create a responsive defense system.
The above tips and tools are sure to help you create robust protection around your business, but to ensure sustainability it is not enough.
Hackers keep on innovating their ways to impose threats upon your business assets. This means you need to make sure that you strive to create watertight operations. To do so, your customers can be of huge help. Go ahead and ask them their key problems while interacting with the brand. Chances are you will discover new vulnerable points to work on.
So now when you know how to identify and mitigate online risks, take the plunge and integrate the best practices today.
Author Bio:
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as an Instructional Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband and parents. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin.
