5 Crucial Tips to Improve Your Employees Awareness of Cyber Threats

Rui Serra By Rui Serra • May 31, 2019

Cyber protection is an essential aspect of every company’s governance strategy. What’s more, it might even be the most crucial part of security in general.

Cyber threats are a huge problem today, and they have been an increasing threat for quite some time. For example, spam is still there and represents a problem. 52% of all Infections are caused by spam messages which are trying to trick people into visiting a malicious link or downloading malicious attachments.

However, spam usually is handled with quality email security methods. Still, it’s not rare that such emails get past your junk folder and into your inbox. Without a proper email security gateway installed for your company, you can expect this to be a more common occurrence than you would usually hope for.

What are the Data Risks for your Business?

According to the Varonis 2019 Global Data Risk Report, some staggeringly high numbers are involved which show us that companies are not protecting enough their sensitive business information:

  • 53% of all companies have more than 1,000 highly sensitive files without any access restrictions.
  • 51% of all companies have more than 100,000 folders which can easily be accessed by anyone who tries.

Naturally, a lot of this data is stale (the same report states that 53% of a company’s information is old), but they still have a lot of unprotected data which, despite its staleness, can even be used against them by skilled hackers.

5 Crucial Tips to Improve Your Employees Awareness of Cyber Threats

Much of this stems from the fact employees of most companies are often ill-informed or haven’t received proper training on cybersecurity. And a simple human error or negligence can cost a company millions of dollars if it results in a successful email or another form of a cyber attack.

So, what can you do about it? How can you amp up your cyber protection? Besides the fact that you need an advanced email security solution, you also need to raise awareness of the workforce.

Here are 5 crucial tips on how to do that:

  1. Create cybersecurity training sessions for the workforce that are not merely thorough but also engaging and fun, as that will make them more useful. Such training needs to include explaining the importance of proper data and information handling, as well as how they should handle emails, passwords, and other sensitive business information.
  2. Protect your company against Email breaches with an advanced email security software to protect the personal data, email addresses, and other personal details,  avoiding this to get into the hands of cybercriminals, resulting in an information breach.
  3. Both you and the executives and board members need to set an example. Bear in mind that a lot of modern cyber threats often target high ranking individuals in companies. Read about business email compromise to get a better understanding of how these cyber threats can affect your company.
  4. Handle authorization and access well on an individual level. Not everyone needs the same level of access, especially when it comes to sensitive company data. Every employee should know what they can and can’t access the company.  
  5. Regularly test your employees by sending them several “bad” emails, to check if they click on a link or if they open an attachment without checking the legitimacy of the header sender. If so teach them how to check if the email is good or bad. Everyone needs to be up-to-date on email security measures and all the new threats to cyber protection.

In the end, try to stress the importance of cybersecurity and a mindset that incorporates it into the daily life of an employee.

By incorporating the tips we’ve given you, your company will be well on its way to having more effective cybersecurity methods than before. Book Your FREE TRIAL of AnubisNetworks Mail Protection Service.

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