You work hard for your money. But today’s highly online financial business operations make your money more vulnerable to all sorts of digital criminals.
No matter how diverse your portfolio is with passive and active incomes, you run the risk of cyberattack as you conduct business online. These days, digital threats abound, and protecting your personal and business information requires substantive cybersecurity considerations.
Fortunately, cybersecurity tools and best practices can help you keep your finances safe even on the internet. Here’s what you need to know about the role cybersecurity plays in financial safety.
The Role of Cybersecurity in Finances
There’s enough to worry about in the course of building a financially independent future, free of debt and limitations. First, you need a career that is both financially and emotionally fulfilling. But even if you’ve found the ideal career, you’ll need to worry about the security of your assets as you accrue them. In today’s highly digital environment, this means thinking about cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity plays an expansive role in financial security, essential to the operation of banks and the convenience of mobile business. For instance, every business stores types of digital documents necessary for efficiency and legal compliance. From invoices to employee records, these documents have to be stored somewhere, and that server must be protected against attack.
That’s where cybersecurity measures come in. Broadly defined, cybersecurity is a state of protection against unauthorized use of data. Since all your assets likely have an element of digital interactivity, these are the measures needed to keep your financial data secure.
In short, cybersecurity is present in your financial security when you:
- Log in to your mobile banking app with biometrics or multifactor authentication.
- Make a purchase online through a website protected with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.
- Store private financial documents on an encrypted cloud data network.
Virtually every other instance of transferring funds or maintaining records online will (or should) involve cybersecurity. Fortunately, the field of digital protection keeps growing as technology advances. We are continuously developing the tools and practices needed for safer financial data. This means an evolving role for cybersecurity in your financial security.
How Tech Can Help Protect Digital Finances
Luckily, we are already seeing great success with the protections offered by modern cybersecurity tech. These innovations stand against the tide of cyberattacks, which grows every passing year. Even before the pandemic, data breaches were on the rise, resulting in damages costing the U.S. an average of $27.4 million annually. Experts now estimate that by 2023, the cost of global cybercrime will approach $5.4 trillion.
Cybersecurity tech, tools, and best practices all have to stand in the way of this flood of digital crime. However, tech is offering some of the most promising financial security protections.
These are just two of these promising technologies and how they bring greater cybersecurity to financial data:
Artificial Intelligence
AI is a useful tool whose realistic applications are a far cry from the nightmarish depictions of sentient machines in science fiction. In reality, AI harnesses complex computational power to bring greater security, transparency, and automation potential to the world of financial security. This means more comprehensive security networks and greater safety.
In one example, Darktrace offers an Enterprise Immune System that tracks all of a bank’s network communication as it searches for outliers. The AI models and learns from normal account behavior so that when something doesn’t look right the algorithm can spot it right away. This allows for security analysis at scale, providing alerts to cybersecurity experts who can then take faster action.
The implications of AI tools in financial security mean safer assets for all of us that use AI-powered banking. But these protections are only the beginning for enterprises and consumers alike.
Blockchain
Then, we have developments like blockchain, which are fundamentally changing finance in a variety of ways. Primarily, this is the technology empowering cryptocurrencies. These digital coins are transforming how we think of money and continue to grow in cultural significance and value.
Now, blockchain systems are being applied to other aspects of finance as well, including cybersecurity. For instance, triple-entry accounting measures make use of the blockchain to store mutually-shared ledgers across decentralized databases. Information goes into the system, then blockchain’s unique cryptographic hash functions keep that data safe. This way accountants can store financial data in three separate places that can be compared against one another. The result is financial management with minimized risk of human error and fraud.
But these technologies represent what may be a high-level or enterprise application of cybersecurity in the financial sector. For the average consumer, there are accessible and simple practices you can employ to promote greater cybersecurity for your personal finances.
Tips for Making Your Finances Safer Online
Cybersecurity can be practiced no matter what technology you are using. Sometimes seemingly simple tasks are all it takes to reduce the risk of a data breach and streamline your financial integrity. As you engage in digital business, consider the following tips for improving your security standards:
- Always enable multifactor authentication on platforms that access sensitive financial data.
- Use strong passwords and regularly update them.
- Take phishing avoidance training or provide this training to employees.
- Research safe platforms with proven commitments to web accessibility and user control.
- Investigate international money transfer services and options.
Tools and tech that give you more control while adhering to web accessibility standards are tools that will promote greater financial security. Web accessibility is another metric by which you can assess the trustworthiness of a website, as legitimate enterprises are typically concerned with making their business safe and functional for all users.
From here, you can maintain a safer financial infrastructure online, protecting your assets with the power of cybersecurity. Whether you run a business or not, cybersecurity is an essential element to consider in financial security because of the role it plays in your day-to-day transactions.
Understand the function of cybersecurity as it pertains to your own finances. Then, follow these tips for better digital hygiene.