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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Workplace Productivity Primer (26-slide PowerPoint presentation). A company can have a team of skilled, talented, and educated professionals where each team member has relevant training and experience, a good attitude, and a solid work ethic. Members of the team get along well with each other. When you put all these together, you get to achieve results. The team [read more]
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Every business and company knows to invest in web security. The size of these investments differs depending on budget and capabilities, but considering how prominent cyberthreats are, even the youngest startups try to protect themselves as much as possible.
The problem is that most executives tend to focus on external threats. Few of them consider their own employees, but that’s where a lot of security risks stem from. A person doesn’t need to have malicious intentions to endanger themselves and your business by pure carelessness; find out which Internet habits pose danger and how to watch out for them.
There are three main problematic Internet habits the employees often display. We’ll explore them one by one.
A lot of digital security issues are born out of the employees’ desire to be more productive. They use tools and outside resources that make their work quicker, but in the end, they invite cyberattackers and attract other types of threats. Even creating the right atmosphere for themselves can lead to security problems.
For instance, a lot of employees work best when they listen to their favorite music. This helps them keep the distracting noise in the office at bay, and it gives them the inspiration and space they need to focus on their tasks properly. Some use the best music torrents to get access to the songs they like and listen to them on repeat, and if they choose a reliable torrent site, they shouldn’t face any problems. However, some employees might be careless enough to download the music from the first random site they see, and this can endanger their personal safety and the security of your business as a whole.
The same goes for people who download work tools from unverified sources, install browser extensions without thinking twice about it, and use online platforms like grammar checkers, editors, and so on. This is what it might lead to:
The employees might genuinely want to improve their productivity, but instead they risk compromising your business security.
Social media platforms are the most fruitful spaces for phishing and other kinds of attacks. A lot of employees can’t help it; they get an urge to check their messages, scroll through their feed, or watch a funny video on a bigger screen, so they use work computers for it.
By 2029, the cost of cybercrime is expected to reach 16 trillion dollars, and social media sites are among the largest contributors. Here’s what might happen:
Even attentive and experienced Internet users can easily fall victim to some of these risks.
These days, the lines between personal and work devices have become incredibly blurred. Employees often treat their work devices as their own; sometimes they perform personal and work activities side by side from the same account. Some might even let children use their laptops whenever they work from home.
This might be convenient, but accessing corporate systems from personal devices increases security risks. Unsecured home routers court invasion, and it’s easy to confuse data and leave sensitive information non-encrypted.
What kind of employee Internet monitor can you get to make sure your employees’ online habits aren’t endangering your work operations? Here are the best strategies.
Leverage behavioral analytics, too, to make sure your IT teams notice whenever the threat materializes. It might be a weak threat or just something that looks like one, but when it comes to business protection, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
To ensure truly efficient cyber threat management, you need to invest in safety on every level, both external and internal ones. Organize a powerful outward defense, but don’t forget about your employees. The most innocent-looking productive tool might hide dangerous malware in it.
Be strict about it; establish clear Internet policies, use approved behavior analytics tools, and foster a security-first culture. At the same time, keep the atmosphere friendly and open.
Always explain whatever new policies you introduce. Set up online training for your employees, teaching them to differentiate between safe and unsafe resources, and work peacefully, knowing you’ve personally dropped the number of risks to a minimum.
You can download in-depth presentations on Workplace Productivity and 100s of management topics from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.
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