The recent prevalence of employees now working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced our ability to identify threats to our organizations. This inherently increases the susceptibility of the organization to falling victim to a data breach. As a small business owner that is able to have a portion of your staff working remotely, you need to have a more vigilant mindset in order to better protect your business against cyberattacks. An advisable place to start is by educating employees on those cybersecurity practices that are appropriate for remote working but that can be easily implemented without a security team next to the employee. What tools do you need to train your employees to have the most comprehensive awareness of cybersecurity issues?
When developing a training for your employees, choose topics that are relevant to your employees. Your employees likely have multiple email addresses and social media accounts that they use daily. These are great topics that are relevant to your employees. When you can link the cybersecurity topic to the employee’s personal life, the employee is then more likely to take the point seriously. This approach will ultimately transfer to the benefit of the security of your organization.
Phishing emails are the delivery vehicle of 94 percent of all malware attacks that are targeted at organizations. By now, it’s likely that we’ve all been educated on what a phishing email may look like and what to do if we don’t recognize the sender or something in that suspicious email looks a little “off”. But how do you really know if your employees are practicing what you have taught them? Test them. There are phishing email platforms, designed for training, that you can utilize to test the security of each of your employees. If used over time, you can see systemic improvements in the security practices that each employee displays.
But all of this training will be useless if your employees are not recognized and rewarded for their good performance. Incentives are the best way to change behavior. You can maybe try a gift card to Amazon, a company that nearly every person uses regularly.
To bring it all around, your incorporating training programs that are relevant to the employees while also showing their progress and rewarding increased security behavior is the number one way that you, as a business owner, can start limiting the organization’s exposure to a data breach while your employees are working from home due to the worldwide pandemic. Usually employees have the ability to make small mistakes because a security team is backing them up like training wheels on a beginner’s bike, but the pandemic has forced all employees to take off the training wheels. We all have to take cybersecurity more seriously now.
LibertyID is the leader in identity theft restoration, having restored the identities of tens of thousands of individuals without fail. If you retain personal information on your customers, now is the time to get data breach planning and a response program in place with our LibertyID for Small Business data breach preparation program. With LibertyID Enterprise you can now add value to existing products, services, or relationships by covering your customers, employees, or members with LibertyID’s fully managed identity theft restoration service—at a fraction of our retail price—with no enrollment and no file sharing. We have no direct communication with your group members–until they need us.
Call us now for a no obligation proposal at 844-411-LIBERTY (844-411-5423).