Cyber attacks are most common at points of weakness within a business. Why spend time an effort creating malware to attack a highly protected system, when there is an easier back door available. For this reason, employees are often a high priority target for hackers.
Fraud, social engineering, and scams can lead well meaning employees to unwittingly give up private information. This means it’s vital that you equip your employees with some basic knowledge to keep them and your business safe.
1. Verify identities
One of the most common, and effective methods of accessing confidential information is also the most obvious…just asking for it. If employees are using any form of communicating to send confidential or sensitive information, take proper steps to ensure the person is who they say they are. This is especially important for receptionists, assistants, and call centre staff amongst others, who deal with a significant volume of communication each day.
It may seem like it adds needless time and complexity to your processes but if you’re busy at work and someone calls claiming to be from IT that just need you to run a quick test for them, you can see how it would be easy for someone to do as they asked without too much questioning. For this reason ensure you have proper protocols in place that all employees should follow to verify the identity of anyone who is requesting information, or requesting some action be taken by you.
2. Use a secure password
Anyone whose used the internet at all in the past 5 years knows the pain of creating secure passwords as required by many websites. This is for good reason as simple or easily guessed passwords put your data at a much greater risk. Use these guidelines to create more secure passwords.
The next step too keeping your password secure is to ensure you don’t write it down or save it in a file. Obviously secure passwords are hard to remember by design, so we recommend using a password manager such as lastpass or dashlane
3. Follow safe browsing practices
Good antivirus software will go a long way to securing you from the worst dangers of browsing. But even the best antivirus often can’t protect a determined employee from downloading, viewing, or installing risky files if they ignore the warnings. Make sure employees are aware of the dangers downloading files can present and ensure they only visit know and trusted websites. Don’t submit private information to any site you don’t know or isn’t using https.
4. Be wary of public wifi
You internet traffic is much more at-risk to users who are sharing the same wifi network as you, especially if you aren’t using a website with https. Don’t browse websites that require logins or personal information on a public wifi that is not password protected (such as in cafes, airports, etc). You are typically much safer if you are connected to a password protected wifi, but even then be careful about who else may be connected to the same network.
5. Keep software up to date
Almost no software is without flaws or bugs. These flaws can often be exploited by creative hackers to gain access to your data or device. Most software is frequently patched or updated with fixes to recently discovered problems. By keeping your software up to date you ensure you aren’t left vulnerable to a flaw that has been recently discovered.