If you are an entrepreneur who runs an online business, your digital properties including your website, social media accounts and emails are the backbones of your business operations. You need to make sure that your data is protected from hackers and your digital properties are running smoothly without any external threats or disturbances.
Over the years the internet security protocols have become much stricter than what they used to be in the earlier days. Unfortunately, over the same time period, malicious hackers and cybercriminals have also grown to become smarter and have developed new tactics that can breach even the most efficient systems.
Even large corporate giants and sensitive government websites have not been able to keep themselves completely safe from such attacks. Data leaks are still a huge issue for many large businesses. Under such circumstances, a small scale entrepreneur cannot risk a cyber attack or a hacking bit that can possibly put an end to his business for good. If you own an online business, here are 5 tips that will help you keep your online business safe from hackers.
Automated Updates
The biggest weakness of most small entrepreneurs is that they tend to avoid system updates and hackers are aware of this. As a result, they become an easy target of such attacks. It is important that you not only update your operating systems but also update software, applications, website plugins and any other ancillary service that might require an update.
Updates help to remove bugs and make your digital properties more secure. A smarter move is to set your system settings for automated updates. That way your system will get updated automatically as soon as an update will be released, even if you miss them out.
Multi-Layer Security
Gaining access control of your website’s control panel is one of the most common ways that cyber attackers use. If you lose your website’s access control to a hacker, there will not be much that you would be able to do and you can easily lose control over your business. It is, therefore, necessary to tighten up access control.
Add multi-layer security and make passwords difficult to guess. The longer and the more difficult alphanumeric passwords are there, the better it will be. Limit the number of logins attempted for an additional layer of security.
Protect Your Website’s SEO
As an online business, you must be aware how important SEO is to your business success and revenue generation. It is your website’s SEO that helps your business stay into the picture and keep it up in the Google’s rating. If your website is attacked, Google can flag it for malware and will even penalize you. The website will redirect your customers to other malware websites and you will end up losing both, your customers and your Google ratings.
As an online business, you cannot take that risk. Moreover, many online entrepreneurs are not too tech savvy and they use third-party CMS services such as WordPress to operate their websites. This limits your control on the website and makes it more vulnerable to Cyber attackers.
As an entrepreneur, you might not be tech savvy enough to address these issues and it would be wise to hire a professional SEO company who can help you protect your SEO. Ask your SEO company or website developer to add an SSL certificate on your website to protect it from malware.
Fraud Protection
As an online business, a credit card fraud being associated with your business could be your worst nightmare. It can be very difficult for you to be able to detect fraudulent credit card transactions because hackers and cyber thieves use different methods of payment frauds.
Luckily, there are payment fraud protection tools available that can flag suspicious credit card transactions and can protect your business from a data breach or a major financial loss. Payment protection tools can help you in many ways. These tools flag suspicious payment activities such as mismatched payment information, repeated orders from the same customers using different credit cards and credit card chargeback frauds.
Disable AutoFill
The convenience of auto-fill cannot be undermined. Filling the same information in long forms at multiple websites can be very annoying and can put off users and therefore many website users prefer using auto fill option.
However, it can be very risky if a computer or a device gets stolen and an unauthorized person gains access to your auto-fill information. A recent example is LinkedIn autofill flaw putting personal data of millions of users at risk.It is, therefore, safe to make an extra effort instead of being lazy and take the risk.
