Your company’s defense against cybercrime and data breaches is only as strong as its weakest link, and most times that weakest link is your employees. Nothing against them as people, of course, but the average employee just does not take cybersecurity as seriously as they do their own job, their paycheck, their lunch breaks, and whose turn it is to brew a fresh pot of coffee. In this article we will know having a great defence is the best way to battle data breaches.
It’s only human nature, of course. When employees go to a new job and learn how to use their keycard to unlock the door, they don’t expect to also be tasked with taking a round as the office security guard or reviewing tapes to make sure nothing fishy is going on after hours. Most feel the same way about cybersecurity and data breaches. When they get hired, they aren’t worried about malware and phishing emails.
That attitude has to be changed in order for your company to be as safe as possible and to avoid data breaches. Employees must learn that because they use the Internet and contact the world outside the office on a daily basis, that they are every bit as much a part of the solution to data security as your IT manager or your Chief Technological Officer.
In order to keep your staff a strength instead of a weakness, there are several best ways to battle data breaches that can be taken to make your staff into a strong link in the chain of security.
Make Cybersecurity Training a Regular Activity
Plenty of companies will make cybersecurity part of the onboarding process in the first week that an employee joins the company, then rely on them to ask questions and otherwise assume they’ll just do everything perfectly whether they work for the company for three months or thirty years. That’s not just ridiculous, it’s impossible to expect. New employees are flooded with information during their first month, not just their first week, and expecting them to remember everything nuance of cybersecurity is unreasonable. Make the training a quarterly occurrence and add some elements of fun into it, such as having it take place off-site or introducing gamification into the process so employees can earn free stuff for performing well on the training.
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Test Employees with Fake Phishing Emails
About 90% of data breaches for companies originate as phishing emails that are unwittingly opened by employees. Test your employees by sending out 10 fake phishing emails per week and see how many of them respond or click the link to the fake phishing website. Like in the example above, turn it into a game with standings and prizes. The employees at the top of the charts can get gift cards or a free lunch, the ones at the bottom will have to take the training over again online and on their time.
Enable Two-Factor Authentication
Your employees are not perfect. They’ll write down passwords and walk off without them; share them with colleagues then never change them when the colleague goes to another company; or make them so easy to guess that a kindergartner could do it. To battle against the simplicity of it all, enable two-factor authentication so that when an employee wants to log in to your system or a vital component, the password is not enough. A second layer, such as a verification code sent to a phone or one available on a fob is the easiest way to keep your data safe. Dashlane is a worthy password manager that incorporates two-factor authentication into its processes.
So, these were some of the best way to battle data breaches, please share your feedback by posting a comment below.
