5 Ways Your Employees Are Putting Your Business at Risk

 

 

 

Majority of security breaches we've heard of recently were triggered by unpredictable behaviour of any organization's greatest asset – their Employees. Whilst the safety veterans are working tirelessly to return up with strategies to mitigate these risks, does one know what typical employee behaviours generally cause these incidents?

Here we list a number of the common scenarios so you'll start arresting the behaviour before it results in a security issue.

1 Opening malicious emails

It is quite common to receive a spear phishing email in your inbox with a link to something you've got won, view a photograph, download a video, etc. to form things harder, many times the sender pretends to be a well-known brand like a serious bank, major chain, an airline, etc. These emails are primarily trying to infect your system with a keylogger to capture your login credentials, which are then used as gateways to other parts of you. Work on the network or defraud your business partners by introducing fraudulent payments to the attacker's bank accounts.

As cybercriminals became more advanced and artistic with carrying on these attacks, phishing has also become tons harder to be detected by an untrained eye. Aside from educating your people, there are another recommendations to stay these cyber threats cornered. One among them is Application Whitelisting where you identify an inventory of trusted and approved applications which will run on your network. Once it's enabled, despite clicking a malicious link, something sort of a keylogger wouldn’t run on the staff’s PC and may potentially prevent a serious security breach.

2 Weak passwords

Most employees are probably guilty of this and a few even make it worse by keeping it an equivalent password for a really long period of your time. It’s almost like building a robust castle with high walls, watch towers, retracting bridges, deep moats, strong bars across the windows, and having an inexpensive lock within the front which may easily be exploited by the bad guys to bypass every other security piece you've got installed. Weak passwords such as birthdays or consecutive numbers such as 12345678 are very easy to guess.

Educate your employees about the importance of keeping their passwords safe and using complex ones that are hard to guess. Enforce policies that enforce passwords that combine numbers, special characters, & different letter cases. You’ll even include in your policy having to vary passwords every 45 to 90 days and not allowing them to reuse previously used passwords. It going to annoy some users, but will surely work for the business.

3 Not backing up corporate data

We often hear lately that your Data is your Dollar value. During this day and age, talking about the importance of backing up data may look redundant, because most businesses roll in the hay anyways. The challenge most businesses face is that some users don’t clearly understand what locations are being protected and find yourself saving valuable content on locations like desktops, personal drives which are often not a part of the backup regime. Just in case there was a security breach encrypting any of those non-backed up locations, it could mean an inexpensive loss to the business thanks to data loss.

You can reduce the impact of a cyber intrusion by educating your staff on storage locations that get protected, which can then assist you recover quickly from an event. Existing Office 365 subscribers have the choice to copy their files within the Cloud using OneDrive for Business or use the more advanced means through Microsoft Azure. You’ll read more about Azure backups here.

4 Poor BYOD (Bring your own device) management

It is not uncommon for employers to enable BYOD programs to stay up with the increasing demand for flexible working. Whilst these programs offer greater flexibility to the new generation of workers, they are doing add another level of complexity for IT to secure corporate data. BYOD may be a great business model, which comes with its justifiable share of business risks like data leakage, limited control over device security which could mean serious security holes which will be exploited by hackers. A commonly known threat to non-public devices is malware that's installed inadvertently by the user, which may potentially find it’s thanks to the company network.

Microsoft has heavily invested in technologies that assist you find the proper balance between productivity and security. Office 365 subscribers can utilize BitLocker to encrypt Windows devices or activate Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and knowledge Rights Management (IRM) for better protection of your sensitive data.

For more advanced threat protection, there’s Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), a device-management and virtual-identity management suite that gives you all the tools you would like to administer, provision and secure the devices that you simply use in your organization. You’ll read more about EMS here.

5 Ex-employees leaking data

Disgruntled ex-employees can often do more harm to the business than what you'd expect. Simply disabling their user accounts after letting them go, might not be sufficient lately. They’ll still attempt to access your company data through a lover and maybe a sympathetic former colleague so it's important that you simply understand where your sensitive data resides and what attention is required to make sure it's a secure event from rogue insiders.

Fix their bad habits

How does one address these habits that put your business at risk? You’ll begin by building a cyber safe culture beginning with the senior leadership team. Without management support, the probabilities of employees getting onboard your security initiatives are likely to be an uphill battle. Follow it through with delivering regular communication and learning sessions to assist them better understand risks and therefore the roles they play in protecting the business from cyber threats.

Do you have the proper IT security strategies in place?

As employees will always play a task in your overall security, additionally to user education, you ought to also specialize in building a long-term security-focused IT strategy. The Australia Signals Directorate (ASD), an intelligence within the Department of Defence recommends below mentioned Essential Eight Strategies as a baseline:

All service here represent your business Website Design and Development , MS Power Apps, Office365 setup andSharePoint, Medical online booking etc.

 

1. Application Whitelisting

2. Application Patching

3. OS Patching

4. Restriction of Administrative Privileges

5. Configuration of Office Macros

6. User Application Hardening

7. Multi-factor Authentication

8. Review Backups

Implementing ASD’s Essential Eight will significantly reduce the danger adversaries trying to compromise your business systems. Furthermore, implementing the Essential Eight proactively are often less expensive in terms of your time, money and energy than having to reply to a successful large-scale cybersecurity incident.

If you're not confident about your existing cybersecurity strategy, Professional Advantage can assist. We offer Essential Eight Strategies, risk assessments also as network and vulnerability scan services, all of which you'll find here if you'd wish to know more information about it. You’ll also ask us at +61 414 925 948 otherwise you can leave your comments below if you've got questions.

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