Breaching small or medium businesses is even easier and more resultative than big enterprises. This is because most of them don’t follow the cybersecurity standards and rarely sue hackers (as it requires lots of money). Cyberattacks often start from the more simple things like connecting to your private net, downloaded apps, unfamiliar IPs, and phishing emails. But don’t worry! It can all be prevented by implementing a simple whitelist.
Whitelist is a list of applications, objects, emails, and IP addresses approved by private network administration to protect it and its device from attacks. All items located in the whitelist are given access to the system that provides them with the ability to install, alter, and communicate over this private network.
Whitelists are usually compared or confused with blacklists. Although these two network administrations are very easy to separate. The main difference between blacklisting and whitelisting is based on the given allowance. Blacklisting is like banning while whitelisting is giving limited access.
While whitelist consists of the applications, email addresses, IP addresses, and websites that are allowed to connect to the system, blacklist always consists of the applications, email addresses, IP addresses, and websites that aren’t. So on the other side, all that isn’t mentioned in the blacklist can be added to the connection for this private network.
According to the latest THE RADICATI GROUP Email Statistics Report, 2015-2019, the number of daily business emails sent and received by a single user is estimated to go up to 126. That’s an indicator of a corporate trend of whitelisting to save privacy, time, eliminate spam, and be sure that they won’t miss any essential information.
Email Whitelisting is also a necessity if you want to be safe and prevent all your data from breaches. 97% of the cybersecurity attacks start from spoofing the email (the production of email messages using a fake sender address that is known and trustworthy by the receiver) and stealing private data. According to the latest research, the 18 messages of 94 received by companies are spam, which will increase until the end of 2021. If you haven’t incorporated whitelisting into your cybersecurity policy, now is the best time to do so.
Another popular kind of whitelisting is an application whitelist. It is intended to prevent the private network from breaches, spam, malware, ransomware, and other threats. The main difference is that instead of the email addresses, the whitelist consists of the applications that have permission to be connected to this private network. Every app that goes apart from the application whitelist is blocked. Apart from this, application whitelists analyze the structure of the app and delete all the irrelevant, old, unlicensed, or prohibited aspects. That saves you time and frees you from unnecessary information and stress.
It’s easy to guess the definition of IP whitelisting after reading about the application and email whitelists. An IP whitelist grants a permit to access your domain for a certain number of IP addresses. This way you limit the number of your web users to a trusted selected few.
If you haven’t figured out the undeniable benefits of setting up a whitelist here and there, we would like to point some of them out. These perks hide a great impact on the way modern businesses operate.
Whitelisting helps companies to scale their workability and efficiency. That’s because companies don’t need to waste time or resources on irrelevant information, spam, and irrelevant information anymore. It also frees employees from monitoring IPs and applications by themselves.
Of course, the most influential and essential benefit of whitelisting is its ability to enhance cybersecurity. Whitelisting makes it hard to penetrate your system because of the need to approve applications, addresses, etc. All other variations of them will be blocked, for example with blacklisting if you don’t list some app, email, or an IP, it could be connected to you.
Still not sure if you need whitelisting or not? Let us consult you for free! We are always welcome to provide the best consultants and other cybersecurity specialists to determine the level of your cybersecurity, give tips and advice, and build your cybersecurity from the ground up.
