Internet security today is a priority for any business. Having your office network safely secured using sophisticated firewall hardware and software means that your business is doing all it can to prevent hackers from trying to get into the system and cause devastation. This is all very well if your employees stay and work in the office only. What about those that work outside the office, travel the country, or travel abroad and connect to the internet using their work computer?
Industrial espionage is something that not many businesses think of these days. Most business owners see this as an internal problem in which staff could be working with the competition for some extra pay. However, the risk of being caught doing this in some countries can result in severe punishment and certainly dismissal for any individuals or groups involved.
What About Online Cyber Attacks Used For Industrial Espionage
Most business network security is to stop hackers encrypting data and demanding money to unencrypt it.
However, it is not often that business owners or even IT managers responsible for network security consider the fact that there are plenty of businesses out there that have an outside man responsible for providing competitor secrets. They pay the person to retreieve the data with no questions asked.
Other companies are quite willing to make a deal from a strange that suddenly calls and says “Hey I have some files about your competitors that you will find useful”. For example, maybe it could be a client list and prices being charged to those clients for services.
Purchasing this information gives the company sales leads and the chance to tailor make packages that offer the same or better service than the competitor at a cut down price. This also means increasing the companies bottom line.
It is a hard deal for many business owners to turn down, and there are plenty of cyber attacks out there that are designed exactly for this purpose.
How Do The Cyber attackers Retrieve Business Critical Information?
There are several methods they can use. One of them is by hacking routers in hotels, restaurants, bars, and other places where their customers connect to the internet. This way the hacker can then look at the sites people are visiting and gather data from their activities.
They can also find weaknesses the user’s devices that can install an undetectable virus that can capture information.
Other known methods have been inside jobs in which an IT person has been paid to install a virus on the local network or even provided access to the company network.
With that in mind, the most common form of attack is by opportunists infiltrating public WiFi systems. This is why your employees should all be taught about cybersecurity. Those that travel should be forced, as a matter of company policy, to use VPNs when they connect to the internet from routers that are not on the office or at home.
Also using navigazione in incognito mode on browsers like Google should be exercised to hide the sites that have been visited. On Internet Explorer, this is known as InPrivate browsing. It means any sites that you visit or information about passwords and so on are not stored or saved by the browser. Therefore, if a company accountant needs to make a transaction while not in the office by logging onto internet banking, then using a combination of a VPN and incognito or InPrivate browsing mode will mean that if hackers do get access to device, it makes it difficult for them to gather any information about their browsing habits.
All this reduces the chances of a cyber attack on your business where hackers can get information about your business and sell it to your competitors. It is a ruthless world out there, so make sure you are protected with VPNs, anti-virus, and use the private browsing tools made available to you on the internet browsers. Your IT team should actually give 30-minute classes to all your staff about cybersecurity at least once every 6 months.
Taking all this into account, your cybersecurity will be perfect!
