Keeping your company safe is of the utmost importance. In today’s world, a data breach can result in costs of several million dollars, not to mention the lost customer trust that you’ll suffer from. To keep a business safe, you need to be able to carry out a cyber security audit, yet how do you do this?
In this guide, we’re going to give you a full and complete vulnerability audit checklist that you can use to analyze your business. This vulnerability management audit checklist will allow you to find and solve the foremost security issues affecting your business and bolster your security.
Are you ready to fix your business’ security problems and improve your protection? Then read on and let’s get started!
How Does Management Treat Security?
Your first port of call should be examining how management treats the topic of security at your business. Have they already created comprehensive security policies, such as ensuring that everyone uses strong passwords, antivirus protection, and a VPN when working from outside of the office?
If they have created these policies, have they trained the employees to ensure that they’re actually using them? You need to train your employees in any new policy you create or your employees will become a weak link in the chain.
Next up, you should make sure that your management has created a list of assets, including computers, mobile devices, network devices, and data. Having an inventory will make it easier to recover from an outage. Creating a chain of data ownership, as well as classifying all the data that you handle by sensitivity is also important, as it will allow you to manage a data breach and discover the responsible party with ease.
What Does Your Employee Training Look Like?
We touched upon the benefits of cyber security awareness training in our last point, but what should a comprehensive cybersecurity training program look like?
You should make sure that you brief your employees on data security and phishing, including spearphising and how to verify someone’s identity. This will help bolster your data security.
You should also make sure that your IT staff check employees’ devices so that they don’t bring a compromised phone or laptop into your network. Password training and training your employees in the use of multi-factor authentication is also very important. You should also ensure that these password and MFA policies are enforced.
Finally, you should make sure that you run all training programs past the CTO or other high-ranking security personnel at your company.
Do You Have a Disaster Recovery Plan?
The sad truth is that hackers target companies of all sizes. Over a third of targeted hacks target small businesses that have fewer than 250 employees. This means that no matter how small you are, security through obscurity is not an appropriate security policy.
To make it easier for you, you should ensure that you have a plan in place that you can use if hackers attack your business. This kind of recovery is often referred to as a disaster recovery or business continuity plan.
You should ensure that every area of your business is under an expert’s responsibility, to ensure that they could respond quickly if you were the victim of an attack. You should also plan out how you would communicate the news to customers, shareholders, and the authorities, as well as the actions that you would take to return things to normal.
It’s also very important to create regular backups. If you ever get infected by ransomware or need to restore your files for any other reason, this will make the process as painless as possible.
When you’ve created a plan, you should ensure that you practice it in mock hack exercises. This will ensure that if the worst happens, you’ll be able to respond swiftly and effectively.
Have You Hardened Your System?
Your network needs to be a tough nut to crack. You need to ensure that you’ve got all vulnerabilities covered, so how can you do this?
You should use system hardening techniques on your servers, workstations, routers, and all other network equipment. This will make your network far less vulnerable.
Update management is another crucial piece of this puzzle. Many operating system or program updates are released to patch up security holes, and if you don’t install the updates, your system will be a lot more vulnerable. Thankfully, you can automate this process, and you should automate it: set it so that your system installs updates outside of working hours for maximum security and the least lost productivity.
You should ensure that you install antivirus software on all of your workstations and that you keep it updated, so that you’re always protected from the latest malware. You should also make sure that you use a firewall that you’ve configured with the proper settings for maximum security.
What Is Your Physical Security Situation?
It’s tempting to think that cybersecurity begins and ends with your computers, but this isn’t true. Physical security matters a great deal too. In this context, physical security is all about how easy or difficult it is for people to access your computers and network equipment.
IP access control that uses keycards or biometric information is a great way to limit access to vital resources. This ensures that only authorized personnel can access your important equipment, keeping it safe from burglars and bad actors.
It’s also worth installing security cameras around your vital resources, so that you can keep your eye on who has accessed them.
Put This Vulnerability Audit Checklist to Good Use
We hope that you’ve enjoyed this guide to creating a vulnerability audit checklist. While it may seem like a lot of work, every part of this checklist needs to be used if you’re going to bolster your company’s security.
If you need some help making your business more secure, we can help you. The team of experts at US IT Services is ready and waiting to help you. For more information, contact us today!