How Should Your Business Prepare for a Cybersecurity Breach?

An employee clicked something they shouldn’t. and suddenly you’re dealing with a security breach.

What happens after depends on how prepared you were before the incident.

Businesses with a response plan can contain the problem, secure their systems, and begin recovering. Businesses without one can end up spending valuable hours trying to figure out what happened.

Preparation is key to keeping your business secure, and in this blog, we’re breaking down exactly why that’s so important.

What Happens During a Security Breach?

It’s Monday, and your receptionist receives an email that looks like it’s from Microsoft. There’s a problem with her account, and she needs to log in to fix it.

She clicks the link.

The login page looks legitimate, so she enters her username and password. A few minutes later, strange emails start coming from her account. Your IT team begins investigating. They secure her account, and everyone is on high alert. Employees are warned not to interact with unusual emails.

But the incident has already affected your business.

Employees have spent hours dealing with and worrying about the problem instead of serving customers. Meetings may have been missed. Your team may have had to temporarily restrict access to certain systems. And now you’re trying to determine whether any sensitive information was accessed.

The phishing email was one thing; the disruption that followed was another entirely.

Why Being “Secure” Isn’t the Same as Being Prepared

No single security product can eliminate your risk. It doesn’t matter if you have antivirus software, firewalls, or strong passwords. While important, there is no such thing as 100% security.

Here are a few security misconceptions we’ve seen time and time again:

Assuming Your Business Is Too Small to Target

Cybercriminals don’t just go after major corporations. Small businesses can be just as (if not more) attractive targets because they may have fewer resources available for cybersecurity and fewer people dedicated to monitoring and responding to threats.

Treating Security Training as an Annual Requirement

60% of all security breaches stem from human error. If your team isn’t receiving security awareness training, they won’t know what to watch out for and how to protect themselves from a security breach. By training your team, you add another layer of much-needed protection.

Putting off Software Updates

Updates bring far more than just new features. Software updates frequently include fixes for known security vulnerabilities. Delaying them can leave your systems exposed.

What Does a Breach Cost a Small Business?

The answer depends on the incident. A compromised email account may be relatively straightforward to contain. A ransomware attack affecting critical business systems is significantly more disruptive.

Either way, the financial impact extends beyond whatever it costs to fix the original problem.

Consider a business with 10 employees making $30 per hour. If a security incident prevents those employees from working for four hours, you’ve already lost $1,200 in employee productivity.

And that’s before considering:

• IT investigation and recovery
• Lost sales
• Missed appointments or deadlines
• Overtime
• Data recovery
• Legal expenses
• Regulatory or compliance costs
• Customer communication
• Potential reputational damage

The longer your business is unable to operate normally, the more those costs can grow.

There can also be compliance consequences for businesses handling protected or regulated information. Depending on the organization and the data involved, requirements such as HIPAA or CMMC can create additional security and reporting obligations.

How Do You Prepare?

The two biggest things separating the prepared from the unprepared are backup and disaster recovery plans and cyber awareness training.

Create a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

A backup and recovery plan forms your game plan for when something goes wrong. Your plan can help you:

• Create an emergency response team that knows exactly what to do during an incident.
• Outline communications channels so people know who they should contact during an emergency.
• Prioritize and protect your most important data and how to recover it.

That last point is supported by robust backup systems that can routinely create copies of your most valuable data, so nothing is permanently lost during a breach or outage.

Train Your Team

Even if you have all the security tools in the world, it only takes one person to fall victim to a phishing scheme. This isn’t necessarily your employee’s fault either; these attacks are getting far more difficult to spot. That’s why it’s up to you as a business owner to locate and provide regular cyber awareness training.

Not a once-a-year course that your employees click through and forget a few months later, but something that is an ongoing part of your business.

By equipping your team with the proper security knowledge, you fill in the gaps your security tools can’t fill on their own.

Uptime Networks Can Help

Uptime Networks can help your business prepare before the worst hits.

That can include helping you configure reliable backups, developing your own disaster recovery plan, implementing security features, providing employee awareness training, or a combination of all of this. We can make sure your business is prepared.

The best time to prepare for a security breach is before one happens. So now is the perfect time to get started.