The Importance of Security Checkups

Written by:

Joel Caskey
Senior Technology Business Engineer
NET Xperts LLC

How secure would you say that your network is?  Small and medium sized businesses tend to not have network security at the forefront of what they do.  A lot of small and medium sized business owners think of network security under the “security through obscurity” approach.  “I’m small potatoes; nobody is going to want to attack me.”

The fact of the matter is that most attacks are NOT targeted.  Small and medium sized businesses are prime targets for cybercriminals because they don’t have the controls in place that a larger corporation has.  A lot of attacks these days are even automated – programs written looking for any hole that they can breach.  Since most small and medium sized businesses do not have cybersecurity experts on-staff, they tend to have more holes than large companies.

October is CyberSecurity Awareness Month. That makes it a great opportunity to give yourself a quick security checkup.  There are some common practices that tend to get overlooked in the SMB market, but can have some big results when it comes to security.  Here are some things to think about:

• Do my employees change their passwords on a regular basis?  Are the passwords that they are using secure?
• Do we change our Administrative passwords on a regular basis?  Here’s a hint – if any of your passwords are “admin” or “password”, you should probably change them.
• Are security patches being done on my workstations and servers?  Are they being checked on a regular basis?
• When was the last time I tried to restore from my backup? If you can’t restore from it, does a backup even exist?
• Do my employees know what a phishing attack is?  How do I respond if a phishing attack occurs?
• Are we using generic accounts?   If multiple people are using the same user name and password for something, then the answer is “yes”.  Generic accounts are bad security practice for many reasons, but specifically, if an employee leaves, how do you secure that account?  Generic accounts also can cause issues with licensing compliance.

I know that some of these things may seem kind of silly or obvious, but these are the things that are commonly overlooked when it comes to keeping your network secure.  Now is the time to ask these questions to get yourself into a better spot.  Remember the Target breach that made national news?  Did you know that this breach originated from a company that is a small-sized company in Pittsburgh?  Protect your network, your customers, and your business – give yourself a security checkup today.  The majority of these items are little to no cost, but make a huge impact.

We have programs that can review these items, educate your employees, and take the necessary steps to help secure your network.  Ask our team today how we can help to improve the safety and security of your network!