What’s the most significant threat facing your business?

There’s a good chance that it’s not a supply chain disruption or a talent shortage. For many businesses, the greatest uncertainty comes in the form of cybersecurity — or a lack of it. As work and the tools used to manage your IT security continue to grow and change, so too will the attacks attempting to mine the vulnerabilities. You don’t want to be uncertain about your cybersecurity program, but what’s the alternative?

The Biggest Cybersecurity Threats

It’s a mistake to believe that the most significant cybersecurity threats come from brute force hacking. In reality, criminals don’t need to force their way into your systems when they have intelligent tools to get you to open the front door — and these tools only continue to become more sophisticated and lethal:

• Phishing
• Malware & ransomware
• Credential stuffing
• Accidental sharing

Even if you feel prepared to tackle these familiar threats, you may not be secure. The increased collaboration between businesses and continued complexity in supply chains means that you are as vulnerable as those you work with. These threats are slated to not only increase in number but also in severity over the next few years. Whether you’re a small business or a government contractor adhering to federal law, you need comprehensive cybersecurity. But what does total cybersecurity look like?

What Does It Take to Achieve Cybersecurity Today?

In the past, companies and individuals took a patchwork approach to cybersecurity. They installed an anti-virus suite, used spam filtering, and implemented network security. While all these measures are core parts of cybersecurity, they often overlapped in some ways but left gaping vulnerabilities in others. Today, it’s crucial to ensure each of the programs chosen for your system complement each other perfectly. If you want to come as close as possible to finding certainty, then you need a good anti-virus and anti-malware program as well as:

• Spam filtering
• Traffic filtering
• Network security
• Firewall monitoring
• Wifi security
• Endpoint security
• Cloud asset security
• Backup securtiy

Your plan doesn’t stop at the office door. In a Bring Your Own Device world, you need to ensure these measures reach every mobile device, including phones, tablets, and computers. You also need to go further and use penetration testing and incident response protocols to identify vulnerabilities, assess risk levels, and implement targeted solutions.