How Your Employees Are Making Your Business More Prone to Cyber Attacks?
Employees are an integral part of every organization but unfortunately, they are the weakest link when it comes to cybersecurity. As cybersecurity tools become more efficient, hackers are finding it difficult to break into systems. That is why they are now looking for soft targets which can give them access to your system.
According to Kaspersky’s study, 52% of businesses think that lack of awareness, carelessness and malice on employees part pave the way for cyber-attack. A study conducted by IBM and Ponemon’s Institute revealed that 48% of data breaches are caused due to acts of malicious intent, human error or system failure accounting for the rest. How do your employees increase your cybersecurity risk?
In this article, you will learn about seven ways in which your employees are making your business more vulnerable to cyberattacks.
- Lack of Awareness and Training
Your employees can either be your asset or liability depending on how you treat them. If you train your employees by investing in cybersecurity training programs and increase awareness by educating them on best cybersecurity practices then, they can not only stay safe but can also help you identify and report facebook hack any suspicious activity.
On the flip side, if your employees lack cybersecurity awareness and training, they are bound to make cybersecurity mistakes that can cost your business heavily in terms of a data breach or cyber-attack. Hackers can easily trick employees that lack awareness and use them as a ladder to get access to your systems. They launch social engineering attacks such as phishing and spear phishing targeting your employees.
- Using Easy to Guess Passwords
One of the biggest mistakes your employees make is that they use simple passwords which are easy to guess for hackers. What’s worse is that employees write down their passwords on sticky notes or share them with their colleagues through insecure channels. In order to combat that, you need to deploy a password policy that forces your employees to set account passwords based on password best practices.
Make sure that your employees are using different passwords to log in to all their accounts. If your employees find it difficult to memorize passwords, you can ask them to use a password manager. Implement multi-factor authentication or biometric authentication for a more secure login process. This way, hackers won’t be able to access your accounts even if they have guessed your password.
- Opening and Clicking on Suspicious Emails
Emails are still a preferred medium for business communication in organizations and hackers are fully aware of that. Cybercriminals send malicious emails containing a malicious link or an attachment. Once your employees click on that link, they would be taken to a suspicious web page but a malicious script starts executing in the background. What’s worse is that hackers can also send emails that can execute the malicious code as soon as you click on that email.
Use spam filters to block spam. Ask your employees to never open emails sent from unknown email addresses. Tell them to never download attachments or click on malicious links. Even if you must click a link sent to you via emails, check it through the link checker tool, which will tell you where it points to and about its health. You can also use the cheap dedicated server hosting as an email server and set up an internal email client for private internal communication.
- Connecting to Insecure Networks
The trend of bringing your own device, globalization and remote work has made business flexible. Unfortunately, that flexibility comes at the price of your business security. When you go on a business trip, finding an internet connection is not easy so you tend to connect to public wireless networks.
These public wireless networks are insecure, and hackers can easily hack those networks and steal your critical business data. Never connect to unsecured public wireless networks. Even if you don’t have any choice but to connect to these networks, consider using a VPN to keep your browsing session private. Make sure to log out of your accounts once you are done. Turn on the firewall and access websites with HTTPS.
- Using Outdated Protection
You might have invested in some of the best cybersecurity tools such as antivirus, anti-malware, anti-spyware or firewall but that is not going to protect you from the latest cybersecurity attacks especially if your protection tools are outdated. Update your operating system, software, apps and security software. Install security patches as soon as it is released by a software provider. This will help you in fixing bugs that are present in older versions. Hackers take advantage of these loopholes and launch targeted attacks on your systems. You can easily prevent that by keeping everything up to date.
- Sharing Sensitive Information
There are instances where your work demands you to share information with your co-workers and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem occurs when your employees choose insecure channels to send and receive critical business information. Hackers can easily launch a man-in-the-middle attack and steal the information in transit that too without leaving a trace. Never share critical information through insecure channels because it can pose a huge security threat to your organization.
- Installing Malicious Apps
With the BYOD trend becoming a norm in workplaces, we are seeing more people bringing their own devices. This means that all those devices connect to your organization’s network. If any of these devices has one of the more malicious apps installed on it, then it can also pose a threat to the security of your network.
Despite all the efforts from tech giants like Google and Apple, their respective app stores have a lot of malicious apps. The probability of your employees downloading and installing one of those malicious apps is high. It is important for a business to check devices thoroughly before allowing them to connect to your company’s network.
What role do your employees play in your cybersecurity? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.
