Employees are a key part of any business. Whether you employ a handful of people or a large team, they’re integral to running a business. Your employees are essential to your company’s cybersecurity, so what do they need to know to stay safe online? This guide will teach you how to secure your employees against hackers.

Why You Need to Protect Your Employees

One of the weakest elements of any company’s cybersecurity is its employees. Employees are often referred to as the weakest link in a business security setup because of the way hackers attack their targets.

According to PurpleSec, 98% of cyber attacks rely on the use of social engineering. Social engineering is a method of cyber attack that relies on fooling human beings into helping hackers. You can learn more about the details of social engineering in our guide on the subject.

Because social engineering attacks rely on human error, the only way to prevent them is to educate your employees.

Danger to Your Employees Is Danger to Your Business

If a hacker targets one of your employees, the employee’s data could be used in a future or imminent cyber attack against your business.

Any sort of online portal that requires employee data to use could be vulnerable. Hackers often use data mining to breach company security.

In one example, a hacker uses an employee’s love of social media to request a password reset. After mining the employee’s data, the hacker calls the company administrator and uses the mined data to answer security questions.

Even in a small company where every employee knows each other, hackers can still request access via text-only communication. It’s possible that hackers could go through your service providers to access your company’s systems.

There have also been examples of where an employee, like a CFO or CEO, has been hacked and the hacker has managed to send out official requests to other employees or business partners to transfer and steal a large amount of money.

How to Secure Your Employees Against Hackers

The biggest part of protecting your employees is ensuring that they are educated on good cybersecurity practices. You should ensure that these good practices are being followed both in and out of the workplace.

Promote Use of 2FA

One of the simplest parts of good cybersecurity is the use of 2-factor authentication. This system requires users to access a secondary device when logging in. Users without 2FA are much more likely to have hackers targetting them.

Almost every online service or app offers some form of 2FA. Promoting the use of these features will go a long way towards keeping your employees safe.

Don’t Allow External Devices.

While you may employ strong security in the workplace, the same isn’t true of people’s personal devices. To ensure a strong level of security, you should not allow external devices to be connected to your corporate network.

Allowing your employees to connect external devices is a potential point of access for hackers. If your employee allows their phone or laptop to become infected, they could spread that infection to your own system.

Even if you offer free antivirus software to your employees, allowing external connections is still a security risk.

Teach Account Security

Educating your employees is as important as using good security services. Everyone involved in your business, from top to bottom, should know how to keep their online accounts secure.

This security needs to extend from work-related products and services to social media and apps. If a hacker breaches your employee’s social media accounts, they could try to break into their work accounts or perform clever social engineering on other employees.

We have a comprehensive set of guides that you can use to teach your employees how to keep their accounts secure.

Prevent Employees Oversharing Information

You should ensure that your employees are careful with what they share on social media. Not only should people refrain from sharing personal information, but revealing too much about their place of work can be as dangerous.

If employees reveal where they work, hackers may target them as a route into the business. It’s possible that an employee posting about work could reveal information later used in a cyber attack.

How We Can Help to Secure Your Employees Against Hackers

If you want to ensure your employees are safe online, we can help.

We have a wealth of educational articles that teach the most important elements of online safety. We have taught millions of people how to recover and secure their online accounts.

Our comprehensive security protection plan is perfect for protecting your employees. We offer free consultations to tailor a protection plan to suit your business.

If you have any questions about your cybersecurity, contact us at [email protected] or arrange a consultation today.

Featured image by Gorodenkoff from Shutterstock.com

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