As difficult as the COVID-19 pandemic has been worldwide, it has forced many of us to focus more health and personal well-being. As we previously shared, there are numerous similarities between coping with COVID-19 and proming better cybersecurity practices. This got us thinking: how do you create the kind of cybersecurity hygiene that keeps your organization healthy, body and soul?

1) Develop a Cybersecurity Hygiene Policy

A company-wise cybersecurity hygiene policy is necessary to make sure your organization remains safe.

For many large US companies, that means a significant “focus on communication and training,” such as “how to back up data” and “how to report security incidents,” revealed Clutch. While these practices matter, verify that you also have a process to audit and enforce your policy, so you can deliver cybersecurity hygiene long term.

2) Educate Employees Across Departments

If you’ve been reading the odix blog, you know how important employee training is at preventing malware infiltration. Humans are humans, and they make mistakes, but with the right skills and training those mistakes happen with less frequency.

However, no training can compete with the evolving best practices to prevent ransomware and phishing, which must be given over to employees regularly. Even if an employee doesn’t have access to sensitive data in order to cause havoc with a click of a button, they could open a malicious file and compromise the network.

With the growing number of employees working remotely, and in turn using their own devices, it’s more important than ever to give your employees the skills and understanding to prevent needless risk to secure networks.

3) Limit Access to Your Assets

Limiting access to your network can be as simple as mandating the usage of complex passwords across the organization. By instituting mandatory alphanumeric passwords across your secure system, hackers are less likely to compromise internal networks.

Additional levels of security, such as encryption of extra sensitive data, the blocking of access to unauthorized team members and guests can ensure careless mistakes don’t turn into profit losing catastrophes.  By limiting the access to your vital network to only verified systems administrators, employees cannot accidentally or maliciously inflect your secure network.

4) Put Up Walls & Create Backups

The use of encryption, and virtual private networks (VPN) can add another vital layer of organizational security for users and admins alike.

Encryption complement the process of backing up files to secure your critical assets in case of a data breach. Secure backup files can mitigate the loss of servers via malware attack, preventing the risk of losing visitor trust and revenue though website downtime.

As prevention is always preferred to reaction, firewalls serve as an essential tool to prevent the free flow of malicious content and attachments from entering your business networks secure systems.

5) Wash Your Files

Also known as antivirus and antimalware software, the process of scanning and sanitizing files before they enter the secure network is part and parcel to detecting potential breaches and stop them in their tracks.

The downside of such software is that it can only detect known malware. To prevent breaches from both known and unknown malware, other systems such as CDR (content destruction and reconstruction) technology must bridge the gaps.

CDR sanitizes and neutralizes all files before they enter the organizational network. The CDR process reconstructs the newly cleansed files and sends them to the relevant team member within seconds.

6) Regularly Audit the State of Your Cybersecurity Hygiene

The only way to ensure your cybersecurity policy and participants are fulfilling expectations is to review both your policy and implementation at a predetermined interval. By verifying your employees remember and apply the training they received, and software products are updated you stand to save IT stress and time.

Spending time to discover what security protocols are missing and what needs to be changed given market trends can be the difference between system security and public scrutiny of best practices. Consider where you’ll want to be by the next audit, and make a proactive plan to get there before hackers do.

To learn more about the range of odix solutions to secure your network against file-based attacks contact our security experts.