Effective Strategies to Protect Sensitive Data From Hackers
2 min read
Hacking of IoT devices is a prevalent web epidemic that affects businesses of all sizes and also individual users. Since unethical hackers use system vulnerabilities to hack sensitive data, security experts suggest different web security techniques that can substantially bring down the threat of malware and phishing scams. Some of those strategies that can safeguard your company from unethical hackers are listed below.
- Ethical Hackers
Ethical hackers work by using the same skill sets that unethical hackers use. The difference being, whilst unethical hackers use their skills to attack a company, ethical hackers work towards safeguarding companies from malware spread launched by unethical hackers.
How And Where To Find Ethical Hackers?
Bug bounty programs are used to locate ethical hackers in order to invite them to scan your software and system storage for vulnerabilities. The procedure is quite meticulous since you’re handing over the entire sensitive information in the hands of someone outside your cybersecurity team.
- Invite ethical hackers and make them enter a non-disclosure agreement before giving them access to test your software codes.
- Once they locate bugs, they will send you the same and you’ll have to patch the detected vulnerabilities within 90 days.
- Once fixed, there’ll be a wait of 90 more days before hackers can release the bugs they identified for the public.
- You have to pay the hackers a bounty that can be fixed in accordance with the severity of the bug detected.
- Network Segmentation
Do not save all the information in one single network. The company should operate on multiple networks and every network should be independent. It offers the following benefits.
- Malware spread remains limited to the network with the compromised source
- Malware cannot jump to other networks until and unless systems in the other networks get infected.
- Response team gets time to locate the source of the infection, isolate it, and backup the information.
All in all, the intensity and impact of damage is far less when you adopt the network segmentation technique.
- Advanced Password Techniques
Cyber experts strongly recommend advanced authentication techniques like MFA, multi-factor authentication. It’s a complex procedure of adding more security layers in order to access the system. Different factors include;
- A username
- A unique password
- Biometric identification
- Location/IP address of the device
A user is allowed access only after successful clearance of all the authentication factors.
On a closing note, it’s better to adopt as many techniques as possible simultaneously to make the web security system stronger and safer.