How to protect your small business from cyber attacks

With many small businesses choosing to make their presence felt on the online space with their websites and with their confidential data being stored on data servers, there is the consistent threat of a cyber attack happening, and there is the need for people to know about remedial steps that can be taken in advance to keep a small business’s website and data safe from cyber attacks.

The term SOAR cybersecurity was first brought out by the research company Gartner, and it is an acronym. SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response. This term is generally used to depict the coming together of three different paradigms of the technological markets, with security incident response, threat intelligence and security orchestration and automation being part of this. What SOAR does for a small business is to give them the ability to accrue security related data from a large number of sources to perform analysis on them and to detect threats well in advance, so that they can overcome such challenges with their data intact.

With SOAR, small businesses are able to understand the historical tactics of cyber attackers, and they can form action plans to tackle them head on. This system also integrates a lot of different security technologies in such a way that the personnel at small businesses can easily understand and be able to deal with threats that require their full attention. The cost of security systems can be overbearing for small businesses and SOAR based solutions helps them deal with such threats in a cost effective way.

The usage of SCADA monitoring systems in organizations has been growing over the last few years at an annual growth rate of above 6%, and these systems are critical to the functioning of these organizations. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition and is comprised of both hardware and software elements that bring together industrial processes under one control umbrella. These systems are typically used to handle Industrial Control Systems (ICS). In a small business focused on manufacturing or with any other critical functionality, these SCADA systems work to assimilate real time data which will help the operators to take critical decisions on the functioning of the processes. Some examples of ICS based systems are found in industries which deal with electricity, water and sewerage processing, oil and natural gas transportation and so forth, which are critical industries.

Because of the widespread proliferation of SCADA and ICS systems even in small businesses as well, it is imperative that proper SCADA cyber security measures are set in place, because of the damage that properly executed cyber attacks can use. With the knowledge that ICS systems are easy targets for hackers because of outdated software, improperly generated passwords, no anti-virus protection, open wireless network access systems and other random security issues.

Using modern security standards to create a SCADA cyber security plan is advisable for small businesses. Make sure all security protocols and software are up to date on the systems and that complete monitoring happens at every instant of time.