Think Before You Click - 6 Critical Cybersecurity Habits Your Employees Need to Build

Business cybersecurity, and all its assorted intricacies and requirements, can be a real challenge for organizations of all sizes to deal with—particularly because it depends so much on employee engagement. That being said, there are a few things you can do to help boost your team’s cybersecurity awareness by promoting more secure behaviors.

Let’s go over some of the most essential.

Think Before You Click

This is one rule that could very well help keep your business safe from any number of cyberattacks, especially when you factor in how many modern attacks rely, to some degree, on fooling the user into enabling the responsible cybercriminal.

Encourage your team members to always give what they encounter throughout the day a second thought before blindly clicking through. Does the email they just received have any unexpected links or attachments involved? Was the email itself expected? Is it filled with typos, grammatical errors, or excessive urgency? These are all signs that an email—or any communications they receive—could be a phishing attack in progress.

Make sure that your team is aware of the threat that phishing can pose in all its forms, from email to phone calls to social media and all the rest. By urging them to take the time and evaluate all correspondence they receive before acting, you can reduce the likelihood that a phishing attack will be successful.

Use Strong Passwords

While modern technology gives us more robust means of verifying our identities, the password is still an important part of the process. Therefore, it is important that your entire team is exclusively using passwords that are sufficiently complex and resilient in order for any of your cybersecurity preparations to be effective.

We recommend that you establish a variety of standards for your password strategy to uphold, including complexity requirements and the use of a different password for each account.

Always Enable Multi-Factor Authentication

Additionally, it is important that you enforce that all of the accounts that your team uses are shielded by more than just the passwords they use to access them. This is where multifactor authentication, or MFA, becomes an invaluable investment into your IT security strategy.

By employing MFA, you require that any account access will require additional proof of the identity of the person supposedly attempting it—and we mean require. This should be a prerequisite on the policy level, applying from workforce utilization on. 

Remote Workers Need to Use a VPN

A VPN (virtual private network) is a great tool for today’s modern, more mobile business. Now, the kind of VPN we’re referring to isn’t the consumer-grade version you might see advertised on social media nowadays… we’re talking about the kind that offer the level of protections that your business will demand. These VPNs allow your remote team members to securely and privately connect to your internal network, enforcing security policies and helping to protect your work information. While it could help you keep track of employee usage for billing or business analysis, the critical benefit is that it helps keep your business’ information where it belongs: on your business’ network.

Avoid Random and Unknown USB Devices

While USB devices are supposed to be these super useful little pieces of utility storage and other functions, they have since lost much of their mainstream appeal. However, they’re still out there… which means that they can still be used as a means of spreading malware.

It’s pretty ingenious in its simplicity. All one has to do is install whatever malware they want to propagate onto the drive, and then leave it in a public place. Then it’s just a matter of time before someone stumbles across it and lets their curiosity get the better of them.

Make sure your employees are aware of this danger and the potential ramifications to help ensure that they don’t become that “someone.”

Only Store Data on The Server (Or in Places You Know for Sure are Backed Up)

Let’s say that one of your team members has spent hours—hours—on a very important project, getting approved for overtime and really committing all their time to this one initiative. They’ve written endless pages of analysis and have really done the research to ensure that this project is as successful as possible. It’s all stored on their work laptop, ready to go.

Until, that is, the laptop slips out of its carrying case and lands, hard, in a puddle.

While this is only one specific example of how data can be lost, it demonstrates one of a business’ biggest potential issues: its data, being outside of its control. There are a litany of other threats and risks that maintaining better control over your company’s data help to mitigate, so instead of allowing your data to be dispersed across devices, make sure that it is being saved centrally on your business’ server.

We’re Here to Help!

We can assist you in enabling and reinforcing these security measures in your own business. Give us a call at (512) 343-8891 to learn more.