Common Online Threats That Employees Face

Humans often learn from their mistakes. However, lack of awareness or a slight mistake in the cybersecurity realm can lead to grave damages. Advances in cybersecurity and cryptography should be making online businesses less prone to hacking and penetration.

However, increased sophistication of the hacking technologies may not let that happen. It now seems that no device connected to the internet is secure from cyber threats. However, enforcing sound security practices can help make lives a little difficult for intruders that are out to cause havoc.

Weak passwords are arguably one of the common security blunders that workers often make. Small businesses have reportedly been struggling with this problem since the dawn of technology. Weak passwords are often responsible for most cyberattacks in the business realm. Most enterprise solutions, apps, and software usually come with default passwords.

However, working them as they are could be as dangerous as leaving your front door open throughout the night. Guessing a password is allegedly the easiest way to infiltrate a system, and it is often the first option for a hacker.

Fortunately, small and large businesses alike can address this problem by intensifying awareness of the importance of strong passwords. Strong passwords can help keep the novice attackers at bay.

Security and usability are often enemies to each other. You may be tempted to disable some security protocols to make your software more usable. However, that can lead to fatal repercussions such as data breach and system hack.

Installing a thick layer of firewall security can ensure that nothing unwanted gets to your system. Firewall security may even make it impossible for an employee to install malware without authorization from the administrator.

Phishing can refer to any situation when an imposter sends an email via social media or a seemingly legitimate advert to trick a victim into clicking a link or malicious attachment. These attachments and links may prompt you to provide your confidential information such as SSN or credit card number.

Train your workers to be skeptical about virtually everything that can help spot phishing threats. You may hire a security expert to monitor how prepared your employees are to cope up with potential phishing attacks.

Installation of unauthorized apps on workstations and personal devices is often a major security threat. While it may now be easy to verify the authenticity of any software, some workers still tend to ignore warnings given by their security systems. Installing unauthorized software can be dangerous because it can grant a hacker administrative privileges.

You can avert this problem by revoking administrative access for highly vulnerable systems and corporate devices. Seminars and online courses on the importance of verifying the authenticity of third-party applications can make your workers aware of threats that unauthorized apps can pose.

Lack of remote security can have devastating effects. Workers who don’t know what is a cyber attack often transfer files between their corporate workstations and personal computers. Some can even allow their relatives and friends to use their corporate devices at home, creating some security loopholes.

Luckily, these loopholes can be sealed by enforcing a policy prohibiting the transfer of work-related files from a personal device to a corporate one.

Companies often use social networking platforms to keep their workplaces lively and collaborative. However, this can pose some security risks, including corporate information being circulated on social networking platforms. You may have no authority over your business information once it gets to social networking websites.

While humans can learn, a slight blunder in the cybersecurity can have devastating effects. As cryptography practices and cybersecurity technologies advance, so do hacking technologies. Weak passwords, phishing, clumsy networking, remote networking, and disabled security controls are arguably the most common security threats that small businesses face.