If I were to ask you what you believed was the biggest potential threat to your business’ future, what would your answer be? The correct answer for most is the risk that an employee might let in a threat—intentionally or not. Let’s investigate how this might happen, and what you need to do to stop it.
How Your Employees Can Pose a Threat
Unfortunately, there is no single way that your team could potentially undermine your business’ cybersecurity. Rather, there are numerous scenarios that could potentially play out. To truly minimize the risk of a data breach or other threat to your business’ continuity, you must have the strategies in place to mitigate them all.
Here are the primary threats that your employees can pose.
User Error
This one’s the biggie. How often have you clicked on something accidentally, or filled out the wrong box on a form, or otherwise made an honest mistake that ultimately threw a wrench into what you were doing? In the workplace, this kind of error is only too easy for your users to make—potentially, with severe ramifications to your business’ productivity or even survival.
Manipulation by External Threat
Today, many cybercriminals understand that the easiest means of getting into a company’s network isn’t through fancy coding or the use of deeply buried vulnerabilities. Instead, the most susceptible access point is arguably the lowest-tech component… the user.
Through means like phishing, many hackers will first identify the most vulnerable users throughout an organization by sending out obvious phishing emails. This allows them to identify users who are most likely to click through the real phishing attack. Of course, this is not the only way that an attacker can use phishing to their advantage, so make sure your users are remaining aware of the real threats out there.
Insider Threat
While less pervasive than many business owners might suspect, these threats are still common enough that you should take precautions against them. An irate or outgoing employee may decide to lash out or take a bit of your data as an insurance policy. This is something that you should obviously discourage, as well as adopt preventative measures against.
How to Protect Your Business from Employee Threats
To help remedy the inherent threats that your workforce brings to your business operations, you will need to deploy a combination of security solutions and company culture standards. Protections like permissions-based access controls will help prevent your data from dispersing to those who have no need for it, while emphasizing the prevalence and severity of today’s cyberthreats will help to keep your team on their toes.
You should also do your best to resolve any employee gripes or complaints, as these may encourage insider threats. While your solutions may not please everyone all of the time, showing that you are giving your best effort will help your employees to see that you are trying.
Finally, you need to invest the time into training your team how to identify potential threats more effectively and how to appropriately respond to them. While it is always important that your cybersecurity solutions are fully up-to-date and optimized for your business’ needs, you need to remember that your team’s preparedness is equally important to securing your business.
For assistance with both halves, turn to Data Net. Our team can not only implement and monitor the protective tools your business needs, but we can also assist your workforce when they need it. To learn more, give us a call at (760) 466-1200.
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