While many of us will be relaxing during the holiday season, it can be a busy time for hackers. With vigilance and staffing down, the holiday break presents a perfect opportunity to target businesses via their essential systems, primarily, their telecommunications systems.
To ensure your business stays protected this holiday season, there’s some steps you can take before the break to safeguard your business from hackers and other threats.
Strengthen your authentication protocols
Implementing strong, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the easiest and most effective ways to secure your telecom systems. Remind employees before they take leave to check their passwords and pass phrases. If they aren’t robust enough, encourage a company-wide reset of passwords, along with in integration with additional security measures such as authentication apps or biometric scans.
Secure and monitor employee remote access
Depending on your business type and demand, some employees may be continuing to work remotely over the holidays. While this flexibility may be essential for their work and your business’ productivity, it does require extra security checks to be conducted.
If your team uses a virtual private network (VPN) to access their files and systems remotely, ensure it is secure and up-to-date. It also pays to regularly monitor access to your internal systems throughout the holiday period. Keep an eye out for unexpected log ins, excessive data changes and suspicious call activity during the upcoming break.
Consider implementing a telecommunications incident response plan
Even if every possible precaution is taken to protect your business from hackers and attacks, breaches can still occur. A detailed response plan works to minimise damage and enable your business to recover quickly from any incidents. While no two response plans will be exactly the same, we help clients to create their own plan based on some pivotal steps, including but not limited to:
- Disconnect from the Internet immediately: The quicker you close the open door hackers are using to get through, the less the potential damage may be.
- Communicate the breach to customers and clients: At Comvergence, we value transparency. We advise clients to be forward and forthcoming regarding any breach so the proper security action can be taken on their end.
- Clean data and take remedial action: Take the time to review every piece of data in your affected systems. You never know where additional harm could be lurking, so it pays to look closely and patch any holes in your security systems.
- Enforce new policies: While breaches can be stressful, they can also be treated as learning experiences for any business. Engage staff in the process of exploring and enforcing new policies to ensure the risk of future breaches is further minimalised.
- Have the appropriate level and type of insurance: Every business is different, so should every insurance policy to protect your valuable data and assets. Review these at least yearly to ensure your business and data is adequately protected.
By adopting a few simple measures, you’re putting your business in the best position to keep your telecommunications secure, even when faced with the threat of opportunistic hackers. Contact us today to learn about our approach to security and how it can save your business from costly disruptions any time of year.