Ransomware, DDoS attacks, data leaks: unfortunately, we face cybercrime more and more often.
A few years ago, there was already a hacking attack every 39 seconds and this number has done nothing but grown since. While you can clearly profit from automating your systems and improve your position in the market by using the latest technological developments, criminals move their interest to cybercrime, a nightmare for every company. As a logistics service company, you must protect your operations from these crimes because the threat of cybercrime grows. Therefore, you must not only secure your logistics software solutions, you also have to prevent hackers from finding a way into your systems via your other IT systems, or via the people in your organization.
But how do you protect your systems? And how can you make sure possible damages are limited? In this blog, we help you to protect your systems as much as possible.
The first questions is ‘can you fully prevent a hack?’. We can debate about the answer, however, we do not believe that a targeted and professional hack can be prevented with 100% certainty, or that an organization can be 100% immune. What you can do, is to try and keep the door closed. You can take maximum precautions to minimize the chance of a successful hack. Starting with these tips:
1. Stay up to date, in your entire organization
First of all, make sure there is no outdated software in your network, which can contain possible breaches. When you have found a breach, updating this particular application is useless. You are probably too late already. Therefore, regularly go live with a complete new environment (for example every year), to prevent one application to become the Achilles heel of your entire organization.
2. Involve your employees
The biggest part of successful hacks is cause by human errors. Therefore, do not only focus on the technical aspect of cybersecurity, but focus on your employees and corporate culture as well. Involvement of employees, reduces the chance that, for example, someone in your organization accidentally downloads a wrong file. Or that someone mishandles their passwords or other sensitive data.
Secondly, it is not only e-commerce that stimulates the market demand. Worldwide, there is also an increasing demand for cold storage around ports to accommodate the growing import and export of perishable products.
Is your organization the target of a cyber attack, despite all precautions? Then you want to count on measurements you have taken to minimize the damage. Make sure you can rely on you digital safety net. You can already take the following measurements now.
1. Clear communication
For example, make clear agreements on who is in charge in this hypothetical situation. State when and how you are going to escalate. And determine who you are going to inform. Even when nothing seems clear, you have to escalate sometimes.
2. Backups
Furthermore, backups of your systems can give you the possibility to directly switch to a different environment. In that way, your processes often can continue undisturbed. The gradation of your measurements, is up to you. For example, you can choose to make extra backups, or even have a complete second environment ready. You can also maintain offline backups, or keep an Excel file of your actual stock, to switch to manual work quickly. In this case, discuss what options fit your organization with your software supplier and system administrator.
Mercurius’ precautions against hackers
The safety of both our systems and those of our customers are top priority. 3PL Dynamics runs on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft monitors its systems continuously on cyber attacks. Besides this, only a limited number of employees has access to the so called Active Directory. With every new Dynamics version, we install a complete virtual environment to fall back on. But, you as a customer can also fall back on backups of your logistics solution. Daily backups and log backups are made, and daily backups are saved geo-redundant in the Azure Blob storage. In this way, we try to guarantee the security of your systems as much as possible.
Do you want to learn more about how Mercurius IT and Boltrics protect your systems against hackers? Or do you want to know more about how to secure your systems yourself?
Please contact us at [email protected]. We are glad to help.
