Many business owners think that a proper security audit involves bringing in a consultancy and cutting a check with too many zeros on it. It’s the other way around. Proper configuration and basic habits account for most financial data security, and you can get started fixing those this week, at no cost.
Start With a Data Map, Not a Tool
You can’t protect what you can’t find. Before you do anything else, grab a pencil and paper and document every nook and cranny where financial data is located in your company, invoices, bank account numbers, tax filings, payroll records, customer card data if you directly handle transactions. How and where does it enter your computer systems? Where is it processed, held, and transmitted? Who touches it along the way, and why?
This is an administrative nightmare, and you will immediately lose interest. But most small businesses I’ve worked with that have gone through this exercise inevitably find that financial data is spread among more locations than anyone realized: an old spreadsheet saved to a shared drive somewhere, an email from an employee who has moved on, a payroll program nobody has used in the past six months. This is your data map, which will turn a general urge to “be more secure” into a list of actual things you need to fix.
Know When to Bring in Professionals
Completing a DIY security audit gives you a good idea of potential problems before they turn into breaches. It’s a way to tidy up and eliminate the low-hanging fruit that tempts script kiddies and makes life easier for state attackers. There are, however, limits to the DIY approach.
Once you’ve mapped your data, tightened access, verified backups, and reviewed vendors, the next layer, simulated attacks, deep vulnerability assessments, penetration testing against your actual infrastructure, benefits from outside expertise. This is the point where businesses often partner with specialized firms like Akika Labs to validate what the internal audit found and catch what it didn’t. It gets you quickly to a point where external professionals can add the most value for a limited budget, testing your protections from the outside, as an attacker would, and bringing deep expertise with specialist tools that can be expensive to acquire and maintain internally.
Fix Access Before You Fix Anything Else
Once you know where the data is, look at who can touch it. Chances are, more people have administrative access to your accounting software than actually need it. This is where the principle of least privilege comes in: every user should have the minimum access required to do their job, nothing more.
Revoke admin rights from anyone who doesn’t strictly need them. A sales rep doesn’t need edit access to the general ledger. A part-time bookkeeper doesn’t need the ability to change bank routing details unsupervised. Pair this with multi-factor authentication on every financial portal, payroll system, and cloud storage account tied to money movement. MFA is cheap, often free, and it’s one of the highest-return security moves a business can make. Insider threats don’t require malicious intent to cause damage. A former contractor’s still-active login is a liability whether or not anyone ever misuses it.
Use the NIST Framework Instead of Guessing
You don’t have to create your own audit process. You can use the NIST Cybersecurity Framework for free, as it was specifically designed for this type of self-evaluation. When conducting an audit on a budget, you can concentrate on two of the core functions out of five it describes: Identify and Protect.
Identify helps you understand your assets, systems, and risks, this coincides with the step of mapping your data described earlier. Protect, in turn, focuses on safeguards: access control, encryption, staff training, etc. You are not required to apply the whole framework from one end to the other. It is usually enough to work through the aforementioned sections to identify and raise awareness of most of the important gaps for a small or mid-sized business. This will also give you a documented process in case your client, a partner, or your insurer asks how you manage data security.
Check Your Backups and Your Encryption
People tend to neglect the importance of backups until ransomware strikes. Then, they become the lifeline for your data. Make sure your financial backups are secured with AES-256 encryption. It’s standard practice and the same level of protection used for your data in transit. But then, go the extra mile and protect your data in the cloud by ensuring that your backups are stored using an offline or immutable storage solution.
If your backup is simply a network share with an online copy of all your data, attackers have the ability to delete, encrypt, or manipulate that copy, rendering it useless when trying to restore your data. You are left with an unusable backup copy. Using an air-gapped offline or immutable storage copy as a backup solution guarantees that no one is able to alter or delete the backup. Used as your restore source, you can quickly recover your data even in the worst-case scenario of an attack.
Audit Your Vendors, Not Just Yourself
The security of your financial data is at risk if any of the third-party systems connected to it is vulnerable. For instance, payroll processors, e-commerce plugins, invoicing tools, and payment gateways interact with sensitive data, and a breach in their security will affect you. Directly ask your vendors if they are PCI-DSS compliant and how they encrypt data at rest. Also, inquire about their breach notification process.
Network segmentation is also important here. Isolate the systems used for financial transactions from your office network to ensure that an infected laptop cannot access your accounting server via guest Wi-Fi. You can use basic vulnerability scanning tools such as Nmap to identify possible points of entry. Since most credentials are stolen using phishing, provide regular training to your staff on how to identify suspicious emails and links.
