Is there any root cause for the rapid increase in high profile cyber attacks over the past few years? Cyber attacks originate for a wide variety of reasons — many that have been discussed in the news recently are a result of hackers with political motivations, some attacks have financial incentives, and others still are designed to harm the reputation of the entity being hacked.

Despite monetary and political aspirations, cyber attacks can also occur out of pure boredom if an attacker happens to find an easy target. In that case, how can a small to medium sized business stop being easy targets? Lucky for you, we’ve got the answers right here…

Don’t Be an Easy Target for a Cyber Attack

Some experts suggest that the motives behind a random cyber attack can happen just to appease the attackers’ sense of accomplishment. One of the most popular attacks is a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). DDoS attacks are common on bank websites, as a hacker will usually control a botnet of infected computers to overload a web facing server with repeated requests. This attack can overload your network with unwanted traffic while causing your web server to crash after repeated attempts for connections.

Because of this, you should take proper precautions to ensure your services aren’t impacted by someone haphazardly looking to launch a cyber attack on an easy target. At this point, you’re probably wondering, what can you do to take your business out of the high risk category for being impacted by a cyber attack?

Steps You Can Take to Mitigate a Cyber Attack

Protecting your network with a tightly configured firewall is the first step you can take to help mitigate a cyber attack. Having a firewall and well-established boundaries in your firewall rules can help prevent unwanted connections into your network. Some organizations will block entire ranges of IP addresses if they are known to originate from a certain area. Another tactic organizations employ is whitelisting the clients that that they trust so that only remote connections between authenticated clients that reside on the whitelist are allowed.

If you have a public facing website, this approach may not be practical for you. Cloud DNS services have emerged to help websites mitigate DDoS attacks. These cloud services filter out unwanted requests for connections, while allowing legitimate traffic to pass through. These services are typically utilized by larger organizations that have public facing portals that are used by large segments of users. Smaller business can get cloud DNS services that scale to their needs, ensuring that the business owner only pays for the services that the business utilizes.

Reduce the Likelihood of a Cyber Attack on Your Business

Closely monitor the traffic on your public facing web assets online. If you begin to see suspicious activity or weird requests for data, these logs could provide evidence that your organization is being targeted in a cyber attack. When you become proactive in monitoring your network, you can begin evaluating products that can help you mitigate the impact of someone attempting to attack your network.

Some businesses elect to outsource the responsibility of protecting their digital assets against a cyber attacks. The market of cloud security brokers has emerged to help small to medium sized businesses avert cyber threats. Many organizations are beginning to go this route, given the peace of mind assured to them by security professionals.

If you have any worries about your network security, please call us at (833) 482-6435, or click the banner below to schedule an IT security audit so we can find the best security solutions for your Greenville, SC or Atlanta, GA area business. Preparation for threats like this is a small cost compared to repairing the damage of an actual infection.

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