Did you know that your employees are probably your biggest cybersecurity weakness? According to IBM Security X-Force’s Threat Intelligence Index 2023, 19% of breaches originate from the inside, and this is because so many involve a human element: social engineering, errors or misuse. That means, you can have the best security software in the world, but your business could still be a victim of an attack if your employees aren’t trained to be aware of their role in cybersecurity.
Here are three ways that employees can create potential threats, and solutions to prevent it:
1. Posting on social media
Everyone likes to share different aspects of their personal life with friends and family on social media. But, this provides a treasure trove of specific information that hackers can use to create targeted social engineering attacks, and trick people into sharing confidential information by gaining their trust. This has become even easier with the rise of generative AI.
As a result, it’s important that you educate employees on how hackers might use information shared on social media against them, and encourage them to think carefully about what they post.
2. Clicking on unverified URLs or email attachments
Phishing is one of the most common ways that cybercriminals are able to gain access to your system. In fact, in 2022, 41% of cybersecurity incidents used phishing for initial access. In this case, it just takes one click on a URL or email attachment for a hacker to infiltrate your network.
With this in mind, it’s important to train staff to look out for these types of emails, especially as they become more sophisticated, and don’t create a culture of blame. Instead, encourage employees to share emails they’re suspicious of with IT security teams.
3. Using weak passwords
We all know how frustrating it is to have to remember multiple complex passwords. But using a weak password is almost like inviting a hacker into your network. And despite all the warnings about this, passwords such as ‘123456’, ‘qwerty’ and ‘password’ are still the most common in 2023.
To solve this, reduce the number of passwords where possible by encouraging use of passphrases, secure password managers and enabling Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) on key accounts.