With the rapid pace of change in the world of computing, there are always new threats to look out for. At the same time, some of the old ones will still be with us for a long time to come. What matters is that if you’re running a business on the internet, there’s any number of threats you need to be wary of. A breach of security in your early days could do irreparable damage to your finances and your reputation.
That’s why you should follow these tips as you get started.
Get a TSL/SSL Certificate and a Firewall
The Card Payment Industry Data Security Standard requires you to have these basic security measures in place, and no cyber security strategy would be complete without them. A Transport Layer Security or Secure Sockets Layer certificate will prevent third parties from spying on or tampering with any communications between a server—your site—and a client—your customers’ web browser—while a firewall will monitor everything coming into and going out of your network to ensure it’s all benign. This is only the first step though.
Test Your Security Measures
Another requirement of the PCI DSS is that your security is regularly tested, and you should get started on this as early as you can in the life of your business. There are many kinds of testing you can employ, but one of the most important is penetration testing.
Also called pen testing, this is a simulated attack carried out by a company you have hired, such as Nettitude, aiming to gain access to your systems and locate valuable data and functions. If they are able to do so, then they have identified a flaw in your security, and they can offer advice specific to your system to counteract this weakness and keep real cyber attackers at bay.
Get DDoS Protection and Mitigation
Some attacks are less motivated by profit than by sheer maliciousness. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks overload a sit with artificial traffic to stop it from functioning properly for any user. Fortunately there are services in place that can sort human users out from DDoS bots, so preventing this from being a crippling problem for your business is relatively simple.
Image credits:
Image 3 – www.bluecoat.com
Image 4 – By VicktoR – Internet, Public Domain, Link
