Human error is the cause of the majority of cyber attacks that impact businesses. Your employees are good people, and chances are that they would never do anything to intentionally hurt your business.
Here are some of the common ways your employees make your company vulnerable to a cyber attack:
- Falling for a Phishing Scam. These are usually received as emails with attachments or links embedded in them. If the attachments or links are clicked, they download malicious software onto the company that can infect the company network. How to protect against this… train your team! If you see something fishy, don’t click on it.
- Being a victim of Social Engineering. These “con jobs” manipulate people into breaking normal security procedures. To avoid these types of attacks, a company should have clear security procedures in place.
- Unrestricted Web Browsing. The internet is a great tool and resource for many job functions, but uncontrolled browsing can be risky for your business. By enabling “content filtering”, employees will not be allowed to access websites that are known to be malicious.
- Bad Password Habits. Companies use many different tools that require numerous passwords, and managing all these passwords cans be difficult. In order to maintain a safe network, it is best practice to make password protection a company policy and institute regular password resets. End users should protect their passwords too by making passwords unique and complex, never writing a password down, and never sharing a password with anyone else.
Training your team and making them aware of these threats is very important to network security. Cyber Security is everyone’s responsibility. If you would like to review your security procedures or policies, please contact JMK today.