AS the world marks cyber security awareness month, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have been advised to pay attention to cyber security along with sales and operations
"We are seeing many of these smaller organizations are running on older systems with little or sometimes no protection at all," Mr Yusuph Kileo, a cybersecurity and digital forensics expert has stated.
Mr Kileo argued that in most cases, startups pay more attention to sales and operations that most often overlook security as part of their agenda.
"Startups are very easy targets for hackers due to inefficient, incomplete or a complete absence of cyber security measures" he added during an interview with the Daily News.
Mr Kileo, who doubles as a board member of the Africa Information & Communication Technologies Alliance (AfICTA), said cyber security becomes an important building block in establishing customer trust for
both small and large organisations.
He used the ongoing cyber security awareness month to remind the startups to have tools and technologies to monitor and safeguard from a man-made disasters in their organisations.
"I urge all organisations small and big to use the ongoing cyber security awareness month to educate their employees and customers on how to be secure when they interact with technology" Mr Kileo emphasized.
Startups should consider cybersecurity as one of the IT investments needed.
Besides, there are cost-effective anti-malware and security software that they can use for their office computers.
In addition, security-as-a-service (SaaS) is now a thing which they have to make heavy upfront investments on security applications and appliances to protect their network.
Instead, the startups can subscribe to scalable security services such as web application firewalls and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) mitigation services for their online infrastructure and applications.
The AfICTA strongly urges internet users and organisations both big and small to take extra precautions by being cyber smart because cybercriminals not only target high profile organizations but also many small organisations.
