Employees are a key part of any business. Whether you employ a handful of people or a large team, they’re integral to running a business. Your employees are essential to your company’s cybersecurity, so what do they need to know to stay safe online? This guide will teach you how to secure your employees against hackers.
Why You Need to Protect Your Employees
One of the weakest elements of any company’s cybersecurity is its employees. Employees are often referred to as the weakest link in a business security setup because of how hackers attack their targets.
According to PurpleSec, 98% of cyber attacks rely on social engineering. Social engineering is a method of cyber attack that relies on fooling human beings into helping hackers. You can learn more about social engineering in our guide on the subject.
Because social engineering attacks rely on human error, educating your employees is the only way to prevent them.
Danger to Your Employees Is Danger to Your Business
If a hacker targets one of your employees, the employee’s data could be used in a future or imminent cyber attack against your business.
Any sort of online portal that requires employee data to use could be vulnerable. Hackers often use data mining to breach company security.
For example, a hacker uses an employee’s love of social media to request a password reset. After mining the employee’s data, the hacker calls the company administrator and uses the mined data to answer security questions.
Hackers can still request access via text-only communication, even in a small company where every employee knows each other. It’s possible that hackers could go through your service providers to access your company’s systems.
There have also been examples of where an employee, like a CFO or CEO, has been hacked, and the hacker has managed to send out official requests to other employees or business partners to transfer and steal a large amount of money.
How to Secure Your Employees Against Hackers
The biggest part of protecting your employees is ensuring they are educated on good cybersecurity practices. You should ensure that these good practices are followed in and out of the workplace.
Promote the Use of 2FA
One of the simplest parts of good cybersecurity is using 2-factor authentication. This system requires users to access a secondary device when logging in. Users without 2FA are much more likely to have hackers targetting them.
Almost every online service or app offers some form of 2FA. Promoting the use of these features will go a long way toward keeping your employees safe.
Don’t Allow External Devices.
While you may employ strong security in the workplace, the same isn’t true of people’s personal devices. To ensure a strong level of security, you should not allow external devices to be connected to your corporate network.
Allowing your employees to connect to external devices is a potential access point for hackers. If your employee allows their phone or laptop to become infected, they could spread that infection to your system.
Even if you offer free antivirus software to your employees, allowing external connections is still a security risk.
Teach Account Security
Educating your employees is as important as using good security services. Everyone involved in your business, from top to bottom, should know how to keep their online accounts secure.
This security must extend from work-related products and services to social media and apps. If a hacker breaches your employee’s social media accounts, they could try to break into their work accounts or perform clever social engineering on other employees.
We have a comprehensive set of guides that you can use to teach your employees how to keep their accounts secure.
Prevent Employees from Oversharing Information
You should ensure that your employees are careful with what they share on social media. Not only should people refrain from sharing personal information, but revealing too much about their place of work can be as dangerous.
Hackers may target employees as a route into the business if employees reveal where they work. It’s possible that an employee posting about work could reveal information later used in a cyber attack.
How We Can Help to Secure Your Employees Against Hackers
If you want to ensure your employees are safe online, we can help.
Many educational articles teach the most important elements of online safety. We have taught millions how to recover and secure their online accounts. If you need further help or have questions, contact us here.
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