Cyber Security Tips for Founders: Hackers Are Coming — Are You Ready?

Why Cyber Threats Matter to Founders

A startup’s success hinges on many factors like a good minimum viable product (MVP), a capable team, and attracting the right investors. Cyber security has also become a key indicator of a healthy and thriving company, putting in the work to protect its assets, clients, and stakeholders.

The Growing Threat Landscape

Ransomware attacks continue to be the greatest risk for startups, especially with their commoditization as a business model brought upon by Ransomware-as-a-Service. These malware attacks are followed by cyber-enabled fraud (social engineering attacks like, phishing attacks, vishing, etc.) and supply chain disruptions as the top priority for CEOs to tackle in 2025.

And startups shouldn’t let their guard down. It’s becoming increasingly popular to target small businesses, like early-stage organizations, as they often provide services to big companies — they’re the perfect entry point for hackers into enterprises.

The Consequences of Cyber Attacks

Startups can have quite a hard time bouncing back from a cyber incident. They wreak havoc from the inside out, affecting operational efficiency, team confidence, asset well-being, finances, and investor and public trust.

• Financial loss is perhaps the toughest blow to take, stemming from data breaches, stolen capital, investor pull-back, and more.
• Reputational damage is an inevitable result of a cyber attack, tarnishing a startup’s image in the eyes of investors, customers, regulators, and partners.
• Legal liability becomes a strenuous burden for startups as they have to face regulations and potential lawsuits if outside parties are affected.
• Business disruption is another major hurdle after an incident, causing downtime, customer service disruptions, and an overall decrease in productivity and motivation within the team.

The D&O Connection

Unfortunately, legal processes must find a culprit — often, it’s startup executives taking the blame.

Stakeholders put their trust in leaders to steer the company and train employees in the right direction, so when incidents take place, they typically resort to Directors and Officers (D&O) claims to hold executives accountable.

As such, there’s even more pressure for founders to take extra precautions against cyber attacks and build outstanding risk management strategies.

10 Cyber Security Tips: Protecting Sensitive Data from Cyber Attacks

What’s the best course of action for founders to avoid the potential risks and build a bulletproof cyber security strategy for their company? Here are 10 vital cyber security tips and practices to make that happen.

1. Implement Strong Passwords and Multi-Factor Authentication

Those in the IT department have always known best; there’s a reason they’re always urging employees to set unique passwords and activate multi-factor authentication (MFA) as prime cyber security practices. These measures ensure hackers can’t simply enter systems with brute force, using personal information, or without access to a personal device.

It might seem simple, but login portals, passwords, and accounts remain some of the most vulnerable attack surfaces in a business. A recent report shows that push authentication, SMS, and proprietary verification codes are the preferred methods for MFA — keep these tips in mind.

2. Secure Your Devices and Networks

Modern companies are fully digitized, so every bit of information is either stored in-office or in the cloud — both of these need to be secured to a T with proper cyber security measures to ensure no unauthorized actors have access to internal data. The best and most well-known way to do so is setting a quality anti-virus in place that can run firewalls between networks, run intrusion detection programs, send security recommendations, and more.

Beyond this practice, it’s important to keep your software updated to the latest version as they include security patches to uncover vulnerabilities, implement new features, and support integrations with other programs.

3. Train Your Employees on Cyber Security Best Practices

With social engineering on the rise, employees are at the frontlines of cyber attacks and the easiest targets. AI, although used vastly for good, is a hacker’s new favorite tool to impersonate employees and executives whether through text, voice or even video using deepfakes and generating human-life prompts. With cyber attack attempts being more believable than ever, even the most tech-savvy employee could fall prey.

It has never been more important to enforce periodic cyber security awareness training sessions to equip employees with the right knowledge to fend off the latest attack tactics.

Offering these courses to train employees is an investment in a startup’s safety and longevity, ensuring the most exposed entry points — your team — know how to identify suspicious emails and other activity, prevent outsiders from accessing data, and avoid potential cyber threats themselves.

4. Back Up Your Data Regularly

Ransomware attacks withhold important data, such as internal documents, employee, credit card details or customer information, forcing a business to partially or fully stop its operations until they pay hackers to release the data. Unfortunately, it’s still an effective tactic as 78% of companies still pay the ransom to recover their data after poor cyber security choices.

Routine backups can help alleviate the impact of these attacks in company operations. Full or incremental backups kept in software, an external hard drive, or the cloud can make a difference between major system downtime and data lost forever or a small hiccup while the saved data is retrieved from the cloud or another source.

5. Develop a Cyber Security Incident Response Plan

“Hoping for the best but expecting the worst” has become more than just catchy lyrics in today’s aggressive threat landscape. The next best course of action after implementing cyber security measures is creating a plan for after an incident takes place — you’re never too safe.

A cyber security incident response plan prepares your company to react and contain an attack and recover from it as quickly as possible. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), key steps include:

• Preparation (like designating a response team and developing recovery strategies)
• Detect and analyze the incident
• Contain, eradicate, and recover
• Meet with management and involved parties to discuss lessons learned

Part of the preparation may also include acquiring insurance like D&O and Cyber Liability to protect the company’s finances and executive team.

6. Adding More Security To Physical Space

Another way of gaining unauthorized access to confidential information is by physically taking it. For example, someone can enter a restricted area by simply tailgating an employee and sneaking in, taking hard drives, USBs, laptops, and other physical assets that directly give them access to data or make it easier to attain.

You can’t underestimate the power of access controls such as cards or biometric devices, security cameras, and even hiring a security company to protect the physical aspect of your business security.

7. Protect Your Website and Online Presence

Every new landing page or even social media account automatically becomes a new attack vector for malware. A company’s online business presence is another opportunity for malicious actors to exploit these assets. From there, they can use malware that can perform data breaches, the infamous Denial of Service (DoS), ransomware, a website shutdown, SQL injections and cross-site scripting.

For companies that highly rely on their websites to connect with clients, such as retail or SaaS, protecting it should be at the top of their list of security tools and controls. Measures include implementing SSL and HTTPS, using a web application firewall (WAF) and Content Delivery Network (CDN), and limiting sensitive information collected and stored on the website.

8. Limit Access to Sensitive Data

One of the best ways to safeguard data is by limiting its access as much as possible. For important data, strictly those who work with it should be able to handle it — this is called Least Privilege. This concept ensures access to sensitive data is extremely limited, reducing the threat of hackers and risk of security breaches even further.

Data encryption, locking it into a secret code to avoid theft, is also an unmissable preventive measure to truly secure and reduce access to data to only a few people with a key or password.

9. Monitor Your Systems for Suspicious Activity

Cyber attacks happen when you least expect them, which makes constant monitoring a must to protect systems from suspicious software activities. For example, a user might be making way too many failed login attempts within minutes or certain code is being edited rapidly after a long time. These are usually signs of malicious software activity in the making.

Today, many tools exist to successfully oversee every attack vector, with security controls such as security information and event management (SIEM) and automated threat intelligence services.

10. Stay Informed About Cyber Security Threats and Best Practices

Cyber security is a constantly evolving environment, marked by new security technologies and equally innovative malicious practices. As such, being aware of monitoring trends is another good measure to fend off threats by reviewing sites from government resources and tools like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and exploring resources from main industry players and tools.

Startups experience rapid growth and fierce competition, which need to be matched with the same level of evolving cyber security best practices to protect the project where they’ve invested so much time, effort, and capital. Employees, investors, clients, and partners all trust companies that visibly take cyber hygiene seriously, implementing as many preventive and reactive cyber security measures, to build a more resilient and competitive business.

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