5 of the most fatal Cyber Security mistakes that your employees could be making

When it comes to Cyber Security, your employees can be both your first line of defence or the weakest link. This is backed up by a recent study from Willis Tower Watson, who revealed that over 90% of all cyber insurance claims have come as a result of a human error or behaviour. Therefore, it is clear from this that businesses need to get the balance right between spending money on cybersecurity technology, providing adequate Cyber Awareness training for employees and adopting a cyber security approach when looking to put together remote working policies and procedures. 

In our latest blog article, we will provide you with 5 of the most fatal Cyber Security mistakes that your employees could be making in your business. 

1) Being duped by social engineering techniques – without having suitable knowledge or adequate cyber awareness training, employees can fall victim to social engineering cons such as spam & malware. 

2) Bad email practices puts sensitive data at risk – clicking on dodgy emails that have malware & clicking on links to download files that are malicious or navigating to websites where hackers attempt to extract sensitive information from you. 

3) Inadequate backup procedures - now being able to regularly back up data will increase downtime and drive up costs if this flow is disrupted or a business is under attack. Therefore, it is crucial that all processes and guidelines as well as backup practices are outlined within a dedicated disaster recovery plan to make that sure that your IT can continue to function in light of a disruption or attack. 

4) Inadequate passwords – poor, short passwords are usually taken advantage of by hackers. For those passwords that use proper names, words based on the username or slight variations on these elements are easy to identify and make it simpler for hackers to crack a system. As well as this, if your employees don’t have the right levels of cyber awareness training they might end up sharing their passwords which puts their accounts at risk. The easiest way around this is to make sure that you have multi-factor authentication which gives you that extra level of protection on top of a password. 

5) Making use of personal devices to look at work information – completely different to using company-owned devices that have the necessary protections and safeguards in place, employees’ devices may not have the same levels of protection and security which could make it easier for hackers to exploit them. 

Why is having dedicated Cybersecurity Training so important? 

It goes without saying but phishing and social hacking are often used by hackers to con employees into giving them access to valuable business data. To ensure that your business has a comprehensive security strategy in place, it is vital that businesses give their employees the latest data protection & cybersecurity training to make sure that they can easily identify any potential security threats and stop them in their tracks. 

Next Steps? 

If you are looking to improve the overall Cyber Security of your business, looking to have dedicated password management or wanted to have a suitable Cloud based backup then please get in touch with our team of IT experts now for more information. 

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