Best Practices for SMB Network Security

If you own a small or medium business in Singapore, it doesn’t mean you’re not on the hit list of cyber attackers, hackers and data thieves. Like every other business, hackers may target you too and in fact, small businesses are more likely to be targeted by malicious programs and well planned attacks.

If you lack reliable IT resources to support your network or to eliminate potential threats, consider speaking to one of our SMB IT network security expert at +65 6639 1839SMB network security

To protect your network, you both software and hardware systems in a perfect harmony, backed by physical and logical barriers. This is how you can reduce the risk of network intrusions and keep business data safe.

Best practices for your SMB network security:

Lock Down Ports: The first thing hackers do while breaking your network security system is to search for an open port. That’s one of the most common network system vulnerabilities. Ports form the very mechanism by which most small business networks open up to the World Wide Web and other networks. Also, it is with help of ports only that your business network can connect with the Internet.

Open ports make it easier for the hackers to break your security system. Lock your ports down through a network firewall so that nobody from the outside can access data or anything confidential. The firewall will lock the ports that need not to be open. Our IT network security engineers, for example, configure rules that decide on which port to leave open and which one to close.

Protect the Network Firewall: A network engineer’s job is incomplete even when you have got an active firewall in place. The real name of the game is to password protect your firewall, for keeping the default password is almost like leaving your SMB network without firewall.

If you are little tech-savvy, you can log into the firewall and find the option to set a unique password. Attackers do easily find out the brand and model number of your devices on a network. With help of this information, they identify the default username and password.

Network SecurityCheck for Security Breach: Why not try what-hackers-do yourself to keep your network safe? Yes, you can have your network scanned by one of our IT support professionals to check if you have any easily breakable network vulnerabilities like open ports. Network security experts use the same methods that security attackers apply.

You can try open source Nmap, the most common tool, to do it on your own. You’ll be provided with a graphical user interface with Nmap but unless you know what you’re doing, it won’t really serve any purpose.

Lock Your IP Address: This is one of the most important preventive measures you ought to consider. Almost all small businesses use DHCP to automatically allocate IP addresses to each system connected to the network, helping users to connect to your network without any problem. In the same way, it might allow the hackers to access your office network!

So, consider locking your IP addresses if your business has a limited number of users and guest users don’t plug into your network every now and then. This way you’ll be able to know where exactly the problem lies, if at all there’s any.

Use an IPS: Since firewall may not be fully efficient to cope up with advanced techniques used by attackers, you can get an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) in place. This technology is always capable of securing your network, for it does more than monitoring ports. Besides, it keeps an eye on abnormality in the traffic flow in order to prevent any damaging activities.

Call Apixel at +65 6639 1839 to secure your IT network you can also drop an email at enquiry@apixel.com.sg. We’ll get back to you.