Ransomware, DDoS attacks, data leaks: unfortunately we live in a time in which 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 automizing 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 also in the logistics industry, 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 prevent hackers from trying? And how can you make sure possible damages are limited? In this blog, we help you to protect your systems as much as possible.

Minimize the chance of a hack

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First of all, make sure there is no outdated software in your network, which can contain possible breaches.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 Therefore, regularly go live with a complete new environment (for example every year), to prevent one outdated application to become the Achilles heel of your entire organization.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.

Microsoft even provides administrators with two computers: one for daily activities, and one for administrator tasks. On the ‘administrator computer’, no program, email or file may be downloaded for safety purposes. Furthermore, the administrator has a different login, which must be confirmed by another administrator to grand access. In this way, it is impossible that an administrator can have access alone.

3. Make your organization less interesting for hackers

When there is nothing to hack, or the operation will be less affected, your systems are less interesting for cyber criminals as well. Therefore, make sure you use various applications that you, if possible, run in the cloud of different suppliers. For example, use Office365 Online from Microsoft, and host your Dynamics solution on the Boltrics (or Microsoft) server. In that way, you local network is less interesting to hack.

Minimize damages when hacked

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.

Our precautions against hackers

As software supplier, the safety of both our systems and those of our customers are top priority. And we act on that. For instance, Boltrics runs on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft monitors its systems continuously on cyber attacks. With every new Dynamics version, a complete virtual environment to fall back on is installed. 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 together with our partner Boltrics and Microsoft as much as possible.

Do you want to learn more about the precautions of Elevate-IT and Boltrics against hackers? Or do you want to know more about how to secure your systems yourself? Mail to info@elevate-it.be. We are glad to help.