Security Practices to Adopt Overnight
Your business faces real cybersecurity challenges today. Like most organizations with an online presence, you have valuable data and systems that need proactive protection.
The good news? You don’t need six months and a six-figure budget to dramatically reduce your risk. The attacks hitting small businesses aren’t sophisticated nation-state operations—they’re opportunistic criminals scanning for easy targets like businesses without multi-factor authentication, teams reusing the same password across twenty accounts, or outdated antivirus software that can’t detect threats newer than 2019.
Cyberthreats move faster than traditional security planning cycles. Attackers have already tried your doors by the time you complete a six-month security assessment. What most SMBs are unaware ofis that a few adjustments you can make tonight can prevent the great majority of attacks before they begin, turning you from low-hanging fruit into a hardened target that attackers avoid.
4 Practices to See Immediate Improvement
There are four practices that deliver immediate impact and protect against prevalent attacks:
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Password management tools
- Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
- A trusted security partner
Let’s break down how each one protects your business.
Enable Multi-Factor Authentication Everywhere You Can
If you do nothing else after reading this article, enable multi-factor authentication everywhere it’s available. This single change can prevent roughly 99% of automated account takeover attempts.
Here’s how it works. Someone steals your password through a phishing email or a data breach at another company where you reused that same password. They try to log into your email, but instead of getting straight in, they hit a second authentication requirement like a code sent to your phone, an approval prompt in an authenticator app, or a physical security key. They don’t have that second factor, so they can’t get in, and the attack stops cold.
The three types of authentication are:
- Something you know, like a password
- Something you have, like a phone or security key
- Something you are, like a fingerprint or face scan.
MFA combines at least two of these methods, making it exponentially harder for attackers to succeed.
SMS-based codes are better than nothing, but they can be intercepted. App-based authentication through Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator is stronger, while hardware security keys are the gold standard for high-value accounts. Pick what fits your team’s technical comfort level.
Turn on MFA for Microsoft 365, your financial platforms, your CRM, your VPN, and your cloud storage. If it offers MFA, enable it. A client nearly lost access to their entire email system when an executive’s credentials showed up in a credential dump from an unrelated breach. The attackers tried to log in within hours, but MFA blocked them cold. The executive never even knew someone tried until the the failed login attempts were flagged.
Setting up MFA takes about fifteen minutes per person, and the protection lasts forever. Learn how to implement this across your organization through Microsoft 365 Security services.
Adopt a Password Management Tool for Your Whole Organization
Passwords remain the number one attack vector because people are terrible at creating and managing them. It is not because they are careless, but because remembering so many unique passwords is impossible.
People use the same passwords as a result. They use the same password for their bank account, project management software, work email, and the random vendor portal they use twice a year. One hacked password becomes a skeleton key to your entire company when any of those services is compromised, and passwords are leaked. Attackers then try those credentials somewhere else.
Password managers solve this by generating long, unique, random passwords for every account and storing them in an encrypted vault. Your employees remember one strong master password while the tool handles everything else, eliminating “password123,” reusing the dog’s name with different numbers, and sticky notes on monitors.
The business benefits go beyond individual security. A password manager gives you clear visibility into who has access to what across your business. You can share passwords securely between team members without sending them in Slack or email, and you can automatically rotate passwords on a schedule. Many tools include dark web monitoring that alerts you when employee credentials show up in breach databases.
It takes about a day to implement. If you need to phase it in, roll it out department by department. The majority of tools work with single sign-on systems that you may already have. Getting people to trust the tool rather than their memory is the most difficult element, but adoption picks up speed once they realize how much easier life is when they don’t have to frequently reset lost passwords.
This is basic cyber hygiene that stops credential theft before it starts. According to CISA’s cybersecurity fundamentals, strong authentication practices, including password management, are among the most effective defenses against common attacks.
Deploy Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
Traditional antivirus worked great in 2010. It compared files against a database of known malware signatures and blocked matches, but attackers have since stopped using known malware and now create new variants constantly. By the time your antivirus vendor adds the signature to their database, the attack wave has already passed.
Watch for Suspicious Behavior, Not Just Known Threats
Endpoint detection and response changes the game. Instead of looking for known bad files, managed EDR monitors for suspicious behavior. A user who normally accesses three files suddenly tries to encrypt 10,000 files? That’s ransomware behavior. A process that shouldn’t be making network connections suddenly starts communicating with an external server? That’s data exfiltration or command-and-control activity.
EDR detects zero-day attacks, ransomware variants that launched this morning, and custom malware written specifically for your industry. It provides real-time threat detection, automated isolation of compromised devices, and forensic data so you can understand exactly what happened and how to prevent it next time.
See EDR in Action
Here’s what that looks like in practice. When an employee downloads malware by clicking a phishing link, EDR quickly identifies the unusual process activity. Before the malware can infect servers or other devices, it automatically disconnects that laptop from the network. The user is informed that their computer has been placed under quarantine while IT looks into the matter, removes the malware, and reinstates access. The ransomware that would have encrypted your entire file server is stopped at a single endpoint.
The catch with EDR is that it requires active monitoring and response. The tool generates alerts, but someone needs to triage them, investigate incidents, and take action. Many SMBs don’t have security staff on hand waiting for alerts, which is where managed EDR services come in, giving you enterprise-grade ransomware protection with experts handling the 24/7 monitoring and response. Explore how this works through comprehensive cybersecurity services designed for businesses without dedicated security teams.
Find a Good Security Partner
You can implement MFA, deploy a password manager, and install EDR, but then what? Security isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. Threats evolve, new vulnerabilities emerge, and your business grows and changes. Systems need patching, configurations need updating, and alerts need investigating.
Small businesses rarely have dedicated security staff. Your IT person is already handling help desk tickets, managing infrastructure, and keeping the lights on, so adding cybersecurity best practices, monitoring and management on top of everything else isn’t realistic.
Get Expert Help Without Hiring a Full Security Team
A trusted security partner fills that gap. They provide 24/7 monitoring, so threats get caught at 2 AM instead of when someone notices something wrong on Monday morning. They handle patching and updates across your environment, regularly review your security configuration regularly to catch drift and misconfigurations, and guide you through the overwhelming landscape of security tools so you invest in what actually matters for your risk profile rather than what the loudest vendor is selling.
Additionally, having the proper partner prevents you from going over budget. Security vendors enjoy using scare tactics to persuade small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that they want enterprise solutions made for businesses fifty times larger. A competent partner helps you identify the dangers you truly face, determine which controls reduce risk the most per dollar, and develop a security program that grows with your company.
Scenario
To help a manufacturing client that kept getting firewall alerts about unusual traffic patterns with no one on staff to interpret them, we investigated and discoveredthat it was a misconfigured IoT device on their production floor rather than an attack, and helped them segment their network properly. Without that partnership, they would have either ignored the alerts (dangerous) or paid for expensive emergency incident response (wasteful).
Managed IT services aren’t about outsourcing responsibility. Think of them as having a security team on retainer, ready when you need them, working proactively to prevent incidents.
Strengthening Your Security Can Start Tonight
Ready to protect your business? Turn on MFA for your most sensitive accounts tonight, roll out a password manager this week, evaluate EDR options this month, and then talk to a security partner about filling the remaining gaps.
These four practices stop the majority of attacks targeting small businesses because they address the most common attack vectors:
- Stolen credentials
- Weak passwords
- Undetected malware
- Lack of ongoing monitoring.
The alternative? Recovering from ransomware is extremely costly for small businesses when you factor in downtime, recovery, lost business, and reputation damage. Implementing these four practices costs a fraction of that and prevents the incident entirely. Don’t wait for a breach to force your hand. Explore how Mirazon’s data protection services can secure your business before you need them.