Cybersecurity Misconception
Your team is your front line defense to cybersecurity. Phishing scams arrive in their email daily. They will be targeted in socially engineered attacks. Are they prepared to fight back, vigilantly, every day?
Some leaders don’t think so. The State of Ransomware 2021 reports 22% of organizations believe the behavior of their end-users will lead to a ransomware attack in the next 12 months.
Don’t live in fear. Educate your team on the risks. Train them to spot attacks. Protect your company and give your team the tools they need to protect their personal information, a true win-win!
Cybersecurity Essentials: Phishing, Passwords, and Social Media
When it comes to team training in cybersecurity – we suggest education in phishing emails, passwords, and social media. Your employees knowing how to spot and report a threat is critical to your organization’s cybersecurity.
Phishing: What it is and how to avoid it
Phishing emails are cleverly crafted, persuasive, and increasingly more difficult to spot. Phishing emails can be detected if employees are trained and day-to-day monitoring is enforced within your company.
Some common tell-tale signs of phishing:
- Aggressive or urgent requests
- Requests for a password
- Appears to come from a senior staff member
- The email comes with a suggested prize and urges you to click on a link
- “Masked” link that resembles a similar website address
Top tip: Hovering over the link should display the actual address.
Train your employees to practice this every single time they receive an email that seems ‘phishy’. If the ‘from’ email address is an incorrect version of someone’s within the company, an invalid website, or looks ‘off’ for any sort of reason, it is best to not click on any links and report the email as spam.
Solid Passwords are key to network security
A solid password is necessary to network security- make sure it’s impenetrable so your privacy stays private. First, it should be at least 14 characters, and not a phrase or a single word (in any language). Create a password that contains a combination of both upper and lower-case characters, punctuation, numbers and special characters. Passwords should not be based on personal information, predictable in any way, or use significant word or number patterns.
Top tip: Don’t base passwords on personal information, like names of family members or birthdays.
Make sure you train your employees to use different complex passwords for every website as well. This will make it more difficult for hackers to guess passwords.
Social Media
Social media is an excellent tool for building brand awareness and engaging your company’s audience. When using social media, especially on behalf of your organization, remember information shared on these platforms is not private, but in the public domain. However, certain privacy settings can provide an extra needed layer of security to your social media accounts.
Follow these tips to ensure your protection:
- Keep all company posts professional
- Don’t post sensitive personal details
- Make sure your privacy settings only allow for trusted people to view posts
- Whenever using another device, always log out when finishing
Top tip: Each social media account should have a different, unique password
It’s a good idea to keep all of your passwords stored in a secure password management software like LastPass.
Employee Training is Still Not Enough
Since your team is your front line of defense, cybersecurity awareness training is critical to help your team and business stay protected against cyber-attacks and phishing attempts. However, the constantly evolving threat landscape brings challenging problems to the world of IT security, and employee training is simply not enough to keep you protected 24/7. Having a knowledgeable source with hands-on help by your side will give your team the confidence to navigate this landscape.
Nutmeg Consulting’s Cybersecurity Solution is Your Best Protection
With Sophos Firewall, our cybersecurity partner of choice, you can rest assured that your network security is in good hands. We know that Sophos is a security solution that offers a next level of protection for web, email, network, endpoint security, data encryption, and data loss protection. This solution protects your network from the latest threats while fast-tracking SaaS, SD-WAN, and cloud applications.
Combined to create an even better cybersecurity solution, Nutmeg Consulting’s network security offers a holistic approach that combines hardware and software-based security solutions with expertly applied monitoring and automation. Security is more than just a firewall- it’s a balancing act between the privacy of your data and the efficiency of your staff. We understand employees need to get work done without having confusing security elements get in the way.
Nutmeg Consulting excels at performing this balancing act between ensuring your team gets work done and your security is upheld with industry best practices. In utilizing Sophos along with our holistic approach to IT, you can be confident that your organization is safe from ransomware attacks and security breaches.
Give us a call today if you don’t want to worry about your organization’s security ever again: (860) 256-4822