In today’s modern era, there are more ways than ever to earn a living. From the rise of jobs in the gig-economy to the professions in the IT field, the economy seems to be flush with 21st century careers. One career option that aids in fueling the economy is venture capital. What venture capital firms do is help wealthy individuals invest their money into more unorthodox business ventures that traditional banks may not be willing to invest in. Running a venture capital firm in the 21st century certainly uses a myriad of web-based technologies on a regular basis – between communication, research, data storage, and so much more, operating this type of business in the modern era definitely requires the Internet. In potentially million or even billion-dollar business deals, venture capital firms have a myriad of sensitive data. All of this data needs to be secure, in order to protect clients as well as your own firm from the threat of cyber criminals. Understanding the threats that these hackers pose is crucial for protecting your business from digital risk.
Understanding Digital Risk
In order to protect your company, you need to understand the serious threat of digital risk. Digital risk can be broken down into a few categories: attack surface reduction, data loss detection, and defending online brand security. Your business needs to monitor its potentially exposed data on a regular basis in order to engage in data loss detection. For attack surface reduction, it is imperative to protect your business’ IT infrastructure, including weak and expiring certificates, open ports, and misconfigured file sharing protocols, from cyber criminals. In order to defend online brand security, it is crucial for your business to check for impersonations of your company on social media and other platforms in an effort to ensure that your business’ reputation stays intact.
How to Combat Digital Risk
While having an understanding of digital risk is essential, once you can identify it for your company, you need to know how to effectively combat it. There are numerous methods that your company can take in order to assist with managing your digital risk, and if you want to ensure safety for your venture capital firm, you have to learn about the different approaches. Firstly, you need to detect your company’s critical business assets and determine what sensitive data your company has. Much of this will be customer data, but there will be many other facets as well. Next, you must assess potential pitfalls by figuring out what threat actors would be attacking in your business – think about monitoring for unwanted exposure from the open, deep, and dark web, social media, file-sharing sites, criminal forums, and git repositories.
Once you have analyzed your digital risk, it is important to set up a tactical mitigation strategy. This requires you to remove duplicitous content from websites by reviewing social media, ISP abuse notifications, and legal notices that will aid you with providing tools for removal. Organizing an operational mitigation program is also useful, as it measures and reports digital risk, allowing you to recognize your total exposure.
Final Thoughts
In the 21st century, venture capital firms often have to deal with a myriad of security issues. In a field that handles such large sums of money, venture capital businesses always need to be protected from and know how to combat digital risk. Understanding this is imperative for success in the venture capital industry.
