Secure Your Business

You Can Protect Your Business from Online Threats

Your business is digitally connected—to employees, vendors and customers—and it has valuable data that cybercriminals want. No business is too small to be a target. From ransomware to phishing, cyber threats are growing. In 2024, the FBI reported over $2.7 billion in losses from business email compromise alone, just one of many threats businesses face. Small and mid-sized businesses are especially vulnerable because they may not have as many resources to dedicate to cybersecurity.

Securing Critical Infrastructure

Businesses directly and indirectly involved with critical infrastructure, including manufacturers, vendors in the supply chain and utility suppliers, are particularly at risk. Threat actors actively look for open vulnerabilities, like weak credentials or outdated software, to break into business systems and plan a wide-ranging attack. Often they look for access to critical infrastructure to hold systems for ransom, which leads to a disruption of supply. Don’t let a weak link in your business lead to problems. Learn important (and achievable) ways you can protect your business and community.

CISA recommends that businesses at all levels implement eight cybersecurity best practices and offers no-cost information, services and tools to help you get started.

Start Here: Four Essentials to Protect Your Business

Cybercriminals look for easy targets. Businesses without basic precautions are vulnerable. Start with these four essential steps to safeguard your data and enable your employees to stop attacks before they happen.

Teach Employees to Avoid Phishing: Phishing tricks employees into opening malicious attachments or sharing sensitive information. Train staff to recognize and report suspicious activity.

Require Strong Passwords: Strong passwords are a simple but powerful way to block criminals from accessing your accounts through guessing or automated attacks. Make them mandatory for all users.

Require Multifactor Authentication (MFA): MFA—also known as 2-factor authentication—adds an extra layer of security beyond passwords. Require it to make accounts significantly more secure. Use phishing resistant MFA where available.

Update Business Software: Outdated software can contain exploitable flaws. Promptly install security updates and patches to keep your systems protected.

Next Step: Level Up Your Defenses

With the four essentials as your foundation, level up by implementing three additional practices.

Use Logging on Business Systems: Log activity so your team can monitor signs that threat actors may be trying to access your systems. Learn how to monitor key information to protect your business.

Back Up Business Data: Incidents happen, but when you back up critical information, recovery is faster and less stressful. Put a backup plan in place that aligns with your organization’s recovery point objective to protect your systems and keep things running smoothly.

Encrypt Business Data: Encrypting your data and devices strengthens your defense against attacks. Even if criminals gain access to your files, information stays locked and unreadable. Make encryption part of your security strategy.

An Additional Step You Can Take

Report Cyber Incident Information to CISA: When organizations and CISA share threat information, everyone is more secure. Report incidents to help CISA warn others and get information in return to help you stay ahead of threats.

Create a Culture of Cybersecurity

As a business leader, your commitment to cyber readiness sets the tone for your entire organization. Implementing our seven cybersecurity best practices will make your organization so much more secure from threats. In addition, create a culture of cybersecurity to enforce stronger policies and set your team up for success.

Start by empowering your IT and security leaders. Define IT leadership roles within your organization early. Include them in high-level decisions that affect risk and operations, and make it clear across your organization that cybersecurity is a company priority. Security leaders should have the authority and support to act quickly during an attack.

Share your cybersecurity policies and procedures with your employees. Make training a regular part of staff onboarding and ongoing development. Plan engaging cybersecurity training activities. Evaluate the effectiveness of security trainings through decrease or increase of security incidents and reporting during phishing simulations. Explore our no-cost resources, including a printable cybersecurity BINGO card for organizations that encourages learning while building a shared sense of responsibility.

Create an Incident Response Plan.Involve your leadership team in regular tests of the response plan and walk through how your company would respond if systems went down, data was stolen or your networks were compromised. Practicing now means less confusion and downtime later.

Make cyber incident reporting part of your company culture. Set a low threshold for reporting suspicious activity. Even blocked attacks or strange system behavior should be flagged and, when appropriate, reported to government agencies like CISA.

Focus on continuity. Identify your most critical systems and make sure they can stay up and running during a cyber incident. Have backups ready and test them regularly. If your business depends on industrial systems or specialized tech, ensure your team knows how to operate them manually if needed. Consider using CISA’s no-cost SCuBA tool to harden software-as-a-service (SaaS) configurations to support best practices on cloud platforms. CISA also offers the Malcom tool at no-cost, which is an open-source tool for industrial control systems (ICS) that provides network analysis.

Cyber threats are a reality, but business disruption doesn’t have to be. Build a culture of awareness, action and accountability.