So You’ve Been Attacked. Now What?

One of the most terrifying situations your business can encounter is when it’s clear that you’ve been hacked. It can cause extreme anxiety regardless of what size of a business you run. The most important thing is to know how to react to mitigate the damage to your business’ network and reputation. Let’s go through a few steps you need to take if you’ve been hacked.

You Need to Contain the Damage!

The first thing you need to do is to do what you can to contain the situation. In doing so you are confronting the fact that getting hacked is not good, but it can get way worse if you don’t do everything you can to keep the situation in front of you. Some of the steps you can take include:

Reset All Passwords and Authentication Procedures

• Updating all of your security software, including firewall, antivirus, and spam protection
• Remove any suspicious software from your server or restore from backup if available

These steps will go a long way toward stopping any malicious activity that could still be at work on your network. This has to be the priority, stopping hacks from causing further damage. 

Call In the Calvary

Most small businesses rely on their users to solve their IT problems. If this is the case for your business, you will immediately want to call in people that can give you the answers that you are not able to discover yourself. Like our professional technicians at Walsh IT Group, a well-trained and certified expert can guide you through the situation with their years of acumen related to information system security. 

Report the Hack

This might be the most difficult part of overcoming a cybersecurity situation: Letting everyone know. Now, in business it is easy to pander to your clientele to position yourself for further business, but in a situation where your network has been infiltrated, you need to come out and let your customers, staff, and anyone that could have had their information stolen, know that they should take the steps necessary to mitigate the damage from the situation.

No sugar coating it: some people will get mad, and some of them will jump ship. That’s just the nature of business. Most people allow access to more of their personal information than you could ever obtain day-in and day-out, but the minute that they trust that data with your organization, they expect you to secure it. You should expect that of yourself, but sometimes things happen and you need to be upfront with people so that they can do what they need to do to control their own situation. 

Be More Proactive

This won’t help you if you’ve had to deal with one of these situations, but it will help you avoid another one. Being as proactive as you can be to ensure that your software is updated, your network is secured by tools such as antivirus and firewalls, and that your staff is properly trained on the best practices of identifying and reporting potential phishing and other social engineering attempts, is a must in today’s high-risk online environment. Your business cannot afford to let its guard down for a minute. 

If you would like to talk to one of our security professionals at Walsh IT Group about securing your network, getting the proper tools in place to be able to maintain continuity if something like this does happen, and to just be prepared overall, give us a call at (832) 295-1445 today.