Financial Services Part 3: 6 Steps to Avoid Cyber Security Risks

With the adoption of GDPR and the Canadian government providing regulatory support in combatting the threat of personal data protection, it’s a chance for organizations – both big and small – to create their cybersecurity plan to avoid cyber security risks.

What can companies do to recognize and combat cybercrime and improve their cyber-education? Here are some tips and best practices that will help you and your company recognize cybercrime and combat the threats.

1. Keep your team educated on cyber-awareness

Education and cyber-awareness is the best defense against cyber security risks. Management and employees should be trained to understand IT governance issues and control solutions as well as recognize concerns, understand their relevance, and respond accordingly. Firms should also invest in cybersecurity education programs for employees to learn how to protect their computers and personal information and how to be aware of the many hacktivists and cyber-criminals that scour the Web in search of targets and vulnerabilities.

2. Collect and analyze security logs for suspicious or abnormal activities

Your IT team should be actively conducting security investigations, regular audits, log reviews, and easy monitoring.  Any seriously suspicious behavior or critical events must generate an alert that is collected and analyzed regularly.

3. Keep systems and applications patched and up-to-date

Hackers, along with malicious programs or viruses, find vulnerabilities in software that they exploit to access your computer, smartphone or tablet. Installing updates fixes these vulnerabilities and helps keep you secure.

4. Use strong passwords and keep privileged accounts protected

Reduce cyber security risks using compromised privileged account credentials. Create an inventory of accounts, apply change management policies to passwords, and store passwords securely.

5. Ensure strong encryption

Encryption keeps you safe. As the last and strongest line of defense in a multilayered data security strategy, encryption is used to safeguard customer data and help you maintain control over it. Encrypting your information makes it unreadable to unauthorized persons, even if they break through your firewalls, infiltrate your network, get physical access to your devices, or bypass the permissions on your local machine. Encryption transforms data so that only someone with the decryption key can access it.

6. Third-Party Management

Financial institutions should work with vendors to find tools that fit their requirements without the need to hire more IT personnel. Advanced data protection solutions can help to reduce the strain placed on the IT team and the security operations center while keeping an organization’s sensitive information safely under lock and key.

We can help!

In the financial services industry, downtime can be detrimental to your reputation and business operations. Thrive’s backup and disaster recovery solutions can help. Our solutions seamlessly address your backup, recovery, cybersecurity, compliance, security, and archival requirements.

With many major financial institutions including credit unions, insurance, and financial services firms as clients, let us provide you with total peace of mind that your data is securely protected. Start your Thrive experience today.

Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2 of our series: Financial Services: Maintain control of your data in the face of an attack