Cybercriminals Want Your Construction Firm’s Proprietary Data

Are You Protecting Your Construction Firm’s Proprietary Data?

You may think that cybercriminals would be better off targeting banks, small government offices and other seemingly more valuable targets. What could your construction firm have that would be worth their effort?

They’re after your proprietary information:

• Employee information
• Designs
• Bid data
• Profit/loss information
• Banking records
• Materials pricing
• And other confidential information

All of this data has some value in one way or another. If you’re not properly protecting it, you’re just making it easier for cybercriminals to steal it.

What’s Should Your Firm’s Cybersecurity Include?

1. Patch Management & Update Best Practices

You can’t afford to ignore software update notifications – but depending on your workload, you may have to. That’s where an IT company and managed services can help.

Software updates are not only to improve the functionality of the software; they also serve as a patch for recently identified vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. Your IT company can handle the management of these updates to make sure that not a single one is ever skipped or delayed.

2. IT Systems Monitoring

Also known as host-intrusion protection (HIP), this type of monitoring software will detect and report specially-developed malware that would otherwise make it past conventional antivirus and antimalware software. Your IT company will be able to deploy a monitoring solution to keep an eye on your systems.

3. Regular & Tested Backups

If you want your desktop files backed up, it’s your responsibility to make sure your cloud is doing so automatically. You must have a backup copy of your data if it’s stolen or accidentally deleted.

Develop a Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery policy that specifies…

• What data is backed up
• How often it’s backed up
• Where it’s stored

4. Who has access to the backups

Backup to both an external drive in your office and a remote, secure, online data center. Set backups to occur automatically. And make sure your backup systems are encrypted.

5. Staff Cybersecurity Awareness

No matter who the email is from or what it’s about, urge your staff to always exercise caution when it comes to clicking on a link or downloading an attachment:

• Be wary of malicious attachments in email messages. They may contain malware that can infect your computer.
• Check to see who the real sender of the message is. The company name in the “From” field should match the address. Also, watch for addresses that contain typographical errors like jsmith@wellsfarg0.com.
• Hover over the URL in the email to view the full address. If you don’t recognize it, or if all the URLs in the email are the same, this is probably a phishing threat. Also, make sure that you and your employees know that all reputable URLs now start with https rather than http.
• Use an email client that scans attachments for malware, and never autorun an .exe file you’re unsure about.

What’s The Best Way To Protect Your Construction Firm?

The fact is that you probably can’t handle all of this on your own. At least, not effectively. As you grow your firm, you need to be able to focus on it, and not worry about your cybersecurity.

That’s why assistance from an expert IT company is so valuable – Boston HelpDesk will assist will help. Our team will help implement a robust range of security measures, deploying security devices like firewalls, patching, antivirus software updates, intrusion and gateway protection, and more. With our help, you don’t have to be worried about cybercrime in the construction industry.

Like this article? Check out the following blogs to learn more:

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