Cybercrime is crucial to any business, as it might cause customer’s trust loss. Confidential data being breached compromises company’s and customer’s information, for it can cause data leakage that can ruin businesses.
This leakage can impact a company in so many ways. It can damage a company’s reputation, cost lots of money, risk identity theft, confidential data being exposed to the public, etc.
Base on IBM’s 2020 report, $3.86 million is the average data breach cost, and the detection and containment time is averaging to 280 days, during 315 days for malicious attack. The present data shows how alarming data breach is, thus searching for ways to prevent the cyber-attack is very important.
What Are The Common Types Of Cyber-Attacks?
Ransomware. A software that breaches important data and blocks access to it until demanded ransom is paid.
Malware. A short term for malicious software includes programs that can harm and damage computer systems such as trojans, viruses, worms, and other damaging programs.
Denial of Service. This is an attack that disrupts the intended function of services of machines, programs, networks, websites, and the likes.
Phishing. This is a fraudulent attack, commonly done by sending emails disguised from a reputable source with malicious links that could be used to steal confidential data such as account or financial information.
Protecting confidential data is very significant as a business entity, company, or organization. The safety of information must come first to avoid losing important data of an entity’s customer and privacy.
Here are some ways to prevent being victimized by Cybercrime:
- Always be updated on encryption processes.
The era is in a drastic time of technological evolution. Thus, the practice of encryption changes from time to time as well. Failure to be updated on the current changes increases the probability of attacks.
Having scheduled regular review of the prevailing encryption processes and technology is advisable. It goes the same with the update of your cybersecurity. You have to be updated all the time as much as possible to secure your data.
- Collect vital information only.
Prioritize collecting necessary data only has lots of benefits.
- Reduction of probability of cyber-attackers from targeting your data
- Increase customer confidence in providing data
- Decrease on unnecessary waste of resources and time
These can be achieved by one of the best ways to manage your customer data which is by Open Source CDP or Customer Data Platform. It is a platform that lets you manage and store records of the master data of your customer from different accessible sources. Then, the data will be sorted and stitched together to form unified data of the customers depending on the needs of your services.
Only getting necessary information will help minimize the possibility of a hacker getting a liking to steal minimal data. The more valuable data that you collect, like monthly income, properties, etc., the higher the risk of a hacker to notice and attack them. Thus, requiring only needed information will lower the chances of an attack.
Prioritizing relevant information can increase trust and instill assurance to customers. It results to the reduction of the chances of a customer having second thoughts in disclosing personal data. In addition, you can also add optional options to give your customer a choice in sharing information. However, the first is still the best than the latter to heighten security.
Not only those, but it can also decrease the time and effort of filling out the sections. So, it will be easier to accomplish it.
- Limit data access.
By limiting the individual who can access the collected data of your customers, you lessen the avenue of a hacker to strike. Not every employee has the need for data access, so assigning only necessary individuals to access is not too much of a problem. Less individual with access reduces the vulnerability of your files. CDP enables you to define who can manage the data of your customers than sticking to shared responsibility, which requires more people.
This strategy can also lower the risk of having internal abuse of the information. Especially if you encounter a conflict with your employees or colleagues that might result to betrayal, but it is just a possibility. Hence it is better to have security measures than nothing.
- Transparent data privacy.
Privacy of customer data is very important that it requires proper handling. In order to ensure the safety of this data, everyone in the company must have enough understanding of the policies of the private customer information, which can increase the assurance of adhering and avoid mishandling issues.
- Destroy data if needed.
Instead of storing all of your customer’s data after your transactions with them are completed. You can consider disposing of the information completely. With this, the risk of your customer’s data being accessed will drastically decrease. It can also leverage the trust of the customer in regard to your transparency and how you handle private data.
- Enable Customers to learn that their data is safe.
Being clear and upfront on how you will use the information to the customer makes it more reliable for them. Disclosing a privacy policy will make your data management smoother and easier to market.
Meanwhile, using a customer data platform will become much efficient as it requires information based on the need of your services and can be easily customized anchored to your data privacy policies. This can help to tighten your security as well as help for the betterment of your relationship with your customers.
- Data silos must be eluded.
Data silos do not just compromise your data analysis but also increases your data vulnerabilities, as it is characterized by the use of information separately per individual with different storage. This method can result to data being placed to unsecured storage or application. It can also make it hard for you to trace and manage all the data, as it is stored differently.
It will also cause inconsistent and inefficient analysis of information. The use of open-source CDP can eliminate this. The CDP enables you to standardize and centralize customer data forming unified information that lets your data management much efficient, accurate, and secure.
Not only that, but it can also improve your team’s coordination and make the time spent gathering data much faster. Therefore, this can increase your team or company’s productivity while protecting your customer’s and organization’s confidential data.