Are you ready to empower your employees as they face cyber scams and phishing emails entering their inbox? Training your staff to recognize common cyber threats will help your Omaha SMB block viruses and malware. But what cyber security topics should you educate your employees on? You will want to be certain you are prioritizing the best topics and training on up-to-date information.
Here are some subjects worth including in your cyber security awareness training program:
1. Email Phishing Attacks
While email may be one of the most popular ways for you to connect with your clients and employees, your SMB business staff will want to double check the emails they receive. Attackers are using smarter techniques to gather personal information so they can impersonate people within the company, including company executives.
Phishing is a hackers way of gaining access to information by intimidating your employee into giving up private data, or an easy loophole into the network. During cybersecurity awareness training, consider running phishing simulations to teach employees what a phishing attack might look like if it were to make its way to their inbox.
2. Protecting Your Passwords
Your employees know they need to keep their passwords safe, but it’s worth reiterating. Your network can be easily infiltrated because staff members use easy to remember passwords, such as QWERTY and 123456. This increases your business security risks and increases the employees chance of having their accounts breached. Review with them how to create secure passwords to prevent security breaches, but also provide tools and resources like multi-factor authentication and a password vault to improve password security and make it harder for hackers to break into.
3. Working Remotely
Cyber security training matters just as much working from home as it does in the office. Those who conduct remote work can be more vulnerable to cyber-attacks since most of their tasks are completed online. They need to be certain their systems are up to date by restarting their devices at least once a week.
Remote workers can also ensure a secure internal connection by utilizing a Remote Desktop Gateway (RDG) with Multi-factor Authentication (MFA). If RDG is not available, you can recommend to your employees to use a secure VPN access with MFA enabled.
4. Protecting Company Data
Are your employees keeping company data private? It’s important to emphasize to your staff their responsibility to protect the privacy of the organization, as well as maintain confidentiality with those you serve and any employee data they have access to.
For healthcare practices, remind staff of HIPAA regulations and take the time to review those data protection procedures if necessary. If they do need to share personal information through an unsecure line, such as email, make sure to add an end-to-end encryption. This way, if a hacker does intercept the email, they can’t see anything but gibberish.
The correct person meant to review the data will be able to gain access, ensuring full security of the sensitive data that was shared. By reminding your employees what they are responsible for, they will use more discretion when giving out information to people inside and outside of your company.
5. Social Media Policy
This is a great time to review your SMB’s social media policy. Are they following the expectations laid out? Employees need to know about the dangers of oversharing and posting private information online, such as the name of their first pet, kids names, or maiden name. While these topics might seem like content worth posting, hackers will accumulate this information to answer security questions and break into bank accounts or private data vaults. If posting a picture, train your employees to examine the content and be sure it doesn’t show other employee’s names, emails, or Zoom links. Gathering information online is an easy way for scammers to contact one of your employees pretending to be a co-worker or executive through a phone call, email, or direct message on social media.
6. Social Engineering
Social engineering is tactic scammers use to build a relationship with your employee by offering valuable, cheap offers or by impersonating a client. There are different strategies hackers use to trick your staff member to get what they want:
- Scarcity- By saying an offer is available for a “limited time only,” the employee will be more likely to click on it.
- Authority- If their “boss” is needing something, naturally an employee will do everything in their power to fulfill that need.
- Blackmail- Manipulating an employee into doing what they want, otherwise they’ll reveal embarrassing or private information
- Baiting/Quid Pro Quo- Enticing the worker with the promise of something valuable or that they’ll offer personal services
No matter what channel your employees receive contact from, it’s best to make sure your staff know the signs and can easily spot when someone’s trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
7. Safe Internet Habits
Employees are on the internet a lot to accomplish their work. Thus, it is incredibly important to know how to avoid unsafe websites and watch out where they might be entering information. Teaching them safe Internet habits with these best practices:
- Recognizing spoofed domains, such as yahooo.com instead of yahoo.com
- Identifying an insecure connection by catching the differences between HTTP vs. HTTPS
- Watching for untrusted or suspicious content that are “worth downloading”
- Never entering credentials or login information into untrusted or risky websites
Basically, if something feels off about the site or advertisement, whether it’s a grammatical error or unsecure connection, the employee should not use the website.
8. What to do if your systems are attacked
Your employees need to know what to do if their computer or device isn’t acting as it is supposed to because of some malicious software they downloaded. While they might be afraid of getting into trouble, there will be less damage once IT support removes or blocks the malware or hacker from doing their damage.
Check out our cyber security training for your staff!
Allow us to save you the time and energy of creating an entire employee Cyber Security Training Program on your own. Arm your staff with the knowledge they need without spending days in training. Contact us to find out more about easy and effective employee training.
