The 3 Top Cybersecurity Resolutions To Make in 2020

With another year nearly behind us, this holiday season is the perfect time to start considering next year’s resolutions. But while setting personal goals surrounding health, fitness, and self-improvement are admirable, they shouldn’t be the only considerations you make going into 2020.

Two thousand nineteen proved to be yet another record-breaking year in cyber-related crimes, with the global cost of ransomware and data breaches reaching more than $2 billion. The most surprising fact surrounding this statistic, however, is that only three out of 10 businesses are well-equipped enough to combat a modern-day cyberattack. This makes it imperative that cybersecurity awareness and planning be a primary objective for any organization going into the new year.

Here are some top cybersecurity resolutions your businesses should make and stick to going into 2020.

Establish Better Email Security Practices

For many years now, email has been the primary method of communication for businesses. In that same amount of time, however, cyber attackers have been using company inboxes as a way of gaining access to sensitive user information and critical business systems. Organizations need to be aware of the hidden dangers that digital communications can unlock and protect themselves accordingly.

It is no longer adequate to rely solely on an employee’s judgment when deciding on whether or not to open a seemingly suspicious email. Due to social engineering and advanced malicious scripting tools, phishing emails and malware-injected correspondences are getting harder and harder to spot. Companies should seriously consider investing in high-performance email security solutions that are designed to not only detect these dangerous emails but prevent them from making their way to employees’ inboxes altogether.

Enforce Stronger Password Management

There are three common mistakes the majority of companies and their employees still make when choosing passwords for their accounts. Namely, these are having weak password formats, using that same format for multiple accounts, and not changing passwords often enough.

Password management can be a nightmare for most people, especially when trying to remember passwords for multiple user accounts. Many people, including employees, ease this pain by using the same password across most of their entire list of accounts. This is an extremely dangerous practice as it widens a company’s attack service if only one of those accounts is hacked and login credentials are stolen.

Users should be formatting their passwords with at least 12 characters and use a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters wherever applicable. Password managers are another valuable tool that use powerful 256-bit AES encryption to allow users to store several passwords for their various accounts. This allows them to have strong, unique logins for all the sites they visit while also having the ability to change them regularly.

Utilize Secure Web Browsing Tools

If the rise of ransomware has taught us one thing, it’s that cyber attackers don’t need to infiltrate your business to cause catastrophic damage – they can simply let you come to them. Browsing to and using unencrypted websites allows all of your activity on those sites to be monitored by attackers while also making it possible to inject malicious scripts directly onto your computer and infect host servers and systems.

Comodo’s Secure Web Gateway is a web filtering solution that lets companies set up policies to block harmful site categories, and more. 

Most businesses don’t enforce the use of specific web browsers with their employees so there is a high likelihood that unencrypted websites are being visited on a daily basis, increasing the chances of an attack or undetected data breach. An effective way to avoid this is by ensuring all employees use a security-first web browser. This ensures online privacy, and incorporates end-to-end protection when visiting encrypted and unencrypted websites.

As you head into the new year and think about better ways to keep yourself and your business protected, it’s important to remember that it’s often the smaller improvements we make that can make a large difference in avoiding cyber attacks.

However, if your resolution is to ensure your business maintains the highest security posture it can going into 2020 and beyond, Contact Comodo to see how our comprehensive portfolio of integrated security solutions can work for you.

By,

Jimmy Alamia

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