As an employer, you have a duty of care to protect your employees and keep them safe when they’re with you and that includes keeping them safe online. What’s more, with cyberattacks and cyberstalking now more prevalent than ever, and 90% of adults using their own mobile phones for work purposes, it means that your company information is at risk too. There is a solution, however, and it doesn’t mean you have to come off the internet.
Source: Pixabay
Educate your staff
Cyberattacks and cyberstalking are a real thing. The latest figures show that there are cyberattacks every 39 seconds. While putting in the appropriate security measures is great, prevention starts internally. You need to explain to your staff exactly what to look out for including dangerous links and phishing emails. Another thing to note is that all seniority levels are targeted, so it’s worth reminding your team not to open anything they don’t recognize and to never pass on information or details if they’re unsure about the recipient.
As a business, it’s likely that you use social media to showcase your products and communicate with customers. Unfortunately, you can be targeted here too. According to ExpressVPN’s social media infographic, though, there are a few things you can do to enhance your safety online. This includes removing the metadata and geolocation data from photos before posting, removing the automatic tag feature so that you have to approve them beforehand, and changing your settings to filter out any words that are likely to offend you or your team.
Source: Pixabay
Be smart with passwords
Passwords and phrases that relate to your business might be easy for your team to remember but this also makes them easy for hackers to guess. Instead, Mental Floss advises that you use different passwords for different platforms. You should give individual team members their own logins too and, when someone leaves, it’s important to update any passwords.
Longer passwords are better and you should use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols to make them even more obscure. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t use your business name in the password and you should also think twice about saving passwords to your browser or having a file online with them written down. Instead, consider a password manager.
Stay private
While you might see it as a good thing if your employees are logging on and catching up with emails remotely, the BBC says it’s damaging. While public networks and wifi can be great and offer a level of convenience, they’re also typically easier to hack. In contrast, those networks at home and in the office are usually encrypted, which makes it harder for hackers to get into. By regularly reminding your employees of the dangers of public networks, you’ll be taking a necessary step in the right direction.
Keeping your office printer and scanners private and secure is important too. Despite not commonly being known to cause cyberattacks, not protecting these machines with passwords allows hackers to get into the system and view sensitive information and data. For this reason, you should regularly wipe the hard drive and don’t just let anyone connect to it.
It’s important to remember that this advice isn’t there to scare you or stop you from using the internet. Instead, it’s to make you aware of the risks and allow you to work safely and securely.
