Is Your IT Support For Accounting Firms Protecting Your Data?
IT support for accounting firms needs to include cybersecurity solutions and best practices. Why? Because cybercriminals continue to target and successfully infiltrate accounting firms.
Cybersecurity is more important than ever in the private and professional fields and for your accounting firm, especially. Have you found the right IT support for accounting firms to keep you secure?
The fact is that the cybercrime business has never been bigger – it’s estimated that the global cybercrime industry will cause up to $6 trillion in damages in just a few years. It remains such a lucrative business because targets – like your accounting firm – keep failing to learn how cybercriminals operate and how to protect against it.
The rate of cybercrime in the accounting industry has gotten so bad that even the IRS is stepping in:
“The important thing to remember is that every tax professional, whether a sole practitioner or a partner in a large firm, is a potential target for cybercriminals,” said IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig in a press release. “No tax business should assume they are too small or too smart to avoid identity thieves.”
How Will IT Support For Accounting Firms Keep You Secure?
A proper cybersecurity defense comes down to three key aspects…
IT Support For Accounting Firms Will Help You Minimize Risk
When it comes to prevention, you should have a range of cybersecurity solutions in place to mitigate the majority of attempted attacks:
- Anti-virus Software: Antivirus software is used in conjunction with a firewall to provide defense against malware, adware, and spyware. Each of these cybercriminal tactics has the potential to do immense damage to internal processes and a company’s reputation. The job of antivirus software is to spot, block, and isolate intrusive, malicious applications so they can’t do damage to your data and legitimate software.
- Firewalls: Your firewall is your first line of defense for keeping your information safe. A firewall is a particular type of solution that maintains the security of your network. It blocks unauthorized users from gaining access to your data. Firewalls are deployed via hardware, software, or a combination of the two.
- Two-Factor Authentication: Two-Factor Authentication is a great way to add an extra layer of protection to the existing system and account logins. 45% of polled businesses began using 2FA in 2018, compared to 25% the year prior. By requiring a second piece of information like a randomly-generated numerical code sent by text message, you’re better able to make sure that the person using your employee’s login credentials is actually who they say they are. Biometrics like fingerprints, voice, or even iris scans are also options, like physical objects like keycards.
- Data Backup: Do you have a data backup policy in place? If not, then you’re vulnerable, right now, to ransomware. Ransomware has quickly become one of the biggest cyber threats to businesses today – remember the Wanna Cry epidemic that infected hundreds of thousands of IT systems in more than 150 countries? That was ransomware, and it could happen to you too. Unless that is, you get a data backup solution put in place.
- Encryption: Encryption technology is a great way to protect important data. By making data unreadable to anyone who isn’t supposed to have access to it, you can secure files stored on your systems, servers, and mobile devices, as well as files sent via email or through file-sharing services.
IT Support For Accounting Firms Will Help You Monitor For Threats
You and your IT support for accounting firms need to know what to look out for:
- Corporate Account Takeover: Corporate Account Takeover has reportedly caused more than $5 billion in damage in just one year alone. All a hacker has to do is get someone’s login info, impersonate them, and then transfer funds they’re given control over. Cybercriminals acquire the log-in credentials through social engineering:
- Phishing: Phishing emails are sent to large numbers of users simultaneously in an attempt to “fish” sensitive information by posing as reputable sources.
- Spear Phishing: This is a much more focused form of phishing. Cybercriminals have either studied up on the group or have gleaned data from social media sites to con users.
- Ransomware: Ransomware infects the target system with malware that encrypts the data and holds it for ransom. Ransomware penetrates systems either through phishing or through vulnerabilities in many web browsers. Hackers spam users with pop-ups informing them of an “infection” or “security alert,” prompting them to click a link, which infects them with the ransomware.
How IT Support For Accounting Firms Helps You Monitor For Threats
IT Support For Accounting Firms Protects Your Email
You need some form of protection to keep an eye on what comes into your inbox. We deliver a 3rd-party email filtering (replacing the built-in Microsoft Outlook spam component) which offers additional features and greater functionality:
- Every user gets a daily summary of what was blocked, allowing them to pick and choose which emails they want to have in their inbox. In doing so, users train the spam filter not to block these messages in the future.
- Every URL included in incoming emails is inspected by the solution to make sure it’s not a dangerous website.
- The system also detects and blocks mass emails sent to your entire organization.
IT Support For Accounting Firms Delivers SIEM
SIEM solutions offer a monitoring service with adaptive threat protection that identifies active cyber-attacks and takes action in real-time to protect your business.
By integrating intelligence from global threat monitoring feeds, this solution responds to network-based zero-day exploit attempts, drive-by downloads, and advanced malware that routinely bypass conventional firewall and antivirus technologies.
Features include:
- Termination of communications with blacklisted or untrusted remote sites.
- Continuous monitoring of and protection against new or abnormal user activity on your networks and systems.
- Real-time notifications of any significant network activity with automatic remedial actions.
IT Support For Accounting Firms Monitors The Dark Web
This dark web monitoring solution is designed to detect compromised credentials that surface on the dark web in real-time, offering your business a comprehensive level of data theft protection – it’s an enterprise-level service tailored to businesses like yours. This dark web monitoring solution keeps tabs on the online world’s shadiest corners 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – no exceptions.
IT Support For Accounting Firms Keeps You Protected
The right IT support will both support and protect what you do. Infiniwiz delivers a range of services:
- Vulnerability Scanning: We scan your IT environment from end to end to identify and address any potential vulnerabilities that could put you at risk.
- Regular vCIO Reviews: IT strategy can be difficult to develop and follow all on your own. That’s why your Infiniwiz vCIO handles it for you. We’ll help you make the right decisions for the future of your accounting firm, selecting the right software, scaling effectively, and planning for your growth.
- Help Desk & On-Site Services: We deliver support when and how you need it – even during tax season. When you’re working long hours to get your clients’ taxes filed, you need to be able to rely on your IT. Should any issue arise, we’ll be there to help fix it
- 24x7x365 Monitoring: Our preventative monitoring helps to anticipate issues before they affect your productivity or bottom line. We’ll keep an eye on your system performance, hardware lifecycles, and more to get ahead of common IT challenges and neutralize them.
- Update And Patch Management: Did you know that the most common way cybercriminals get into a network is through loopholes in popular software, applications, and programs? Despite how advanced modern software is, humans are still designed, and the fact is that humans make mistakes. Due to this, much of the software you rely on to get work done every day could have flaws — or “exploits” — that leave you vulnerable to security breaches.
Comprehensive and regular patch management is a crucial part of proper IT security, which Infiniwiz will handle for you.
Infiniwiz Admin