Your employees as the most important link in your online security
In the context of user awareness, you have without doubt heard that your employees are the weakest link in your cyber security. Even though there’s a lot of truth to it, we at spotit like to think differently. We do not consider employees the weakest link, but the most important one.
Why are employees the weakest link?
It doesn’t matter how well you’ve organized your network, which security measures you have in place, and which protocols and procedures you designed. If your employees are not aware of safe internet behavior and the associated dangers, your organization is always at risk. It’s undeniable. Cyber criminals are also aware of this and make eager use of it.
Maybe you’ve experienced it too. You receive an email from a Nigerian prince counting down the last days to his death and he doesn’t know what to do with his fortune. Even though you don’t know the man personally, he wants to gift it all to you. The only thing you need to do is send him 1.000 EUR first.
By now, this scam is as old as the hills, and (hopefully) no one falling for it anymore. However, thousands of phishing emails are still sent out daily. The problem is, they are not always that easy to detect. Those phishing emails often look much more realistic and credible and are sent out within a professional environment. Imagine the finance department receiving a false invoice and paying it without any control or suspicion. Such a one-off false invoice does not seem maybe that bad at first, until you discover this has been going on for months. It could cost your company a lot of money. In addition to false invoices, scammers attach false documents, containing little pieces of code to access the network. Once they are in, they could cause a lot of damage, like downloading and selling your sensitive data, or installing ransomware on all devices to lock the data. In both cases, they have a financial motive.
How to protect your employees?
As mentioned before, your employees play the biggest role in your cyber security. You don’t want them to pay false invoices or send money to that Nigerian prince. By informing them thoroughly about the online world, you could limit the risks significantly. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to run one campaign and afterwards assume all employees know what to keep an eye out for. Cyber criminals keep specializing and tend to attack during the most vulnerable times. That’s why repetition is important. Think about a weekly information email about a certain topic, monthly awareness content required to follow via an online learning platform, a poster with tips & tricks in the hallway, or a semi-annual workshop everyone attends. This way, you can keep your employees alert and make sure cyber security is always top of mind throughout the entire organization.
What can we do for you?
Together with you, we can develop a tailor-made trajectory for your employees, ranging from classroom sessions to individual training. With a variety of videos, information emails, quizzes, and simulations, you can inform your employees about topics like ransomware, phishing attacks, physical security, etc.
After the program, we can test the effectiveness of the training course by sending out staged phishing emails. Those results could help us adjust the program to raise user awareness to a higher level.
Finally, we could integrate the spotit AMIphished solution into your environment. This service adds a ‘report phishing’ button to the mailboxes to report suspicious emails. The spotit SOC analyzes and reports back the results to the user. This fast reaction could make a difference by preventing a phishing email to be opened or forwarded.