The ease of information access in today’s day and age has opened the door to outside attacks on all manner of businesses. It doesn’t matter if you are a grocery store, a hospital, or a water well drilling company, there are criminals out there who want to steal your information.
What many companies don’t realize, however, is that many outside attacks are helped along by their own staff, whether directly or indirectly. Here are some ways you can protect your business from insider threats:
- Controlling Email Attachments and Links: Malware is the leading threat in today’s digital world. Simply by clicking a link or opening an unauthorized attachment your employees can unleash an attack on your business. Malware assessment is offered through many different security companies to help weed out potentially dangerous attachments.
- Managing Access: Your Human Resources team should work with your managers to determine the roles and necessary data access for each employee. By restricting access to certain critical information for only those who need it to do their jobs, employers can add an extra layer of protection.
- Be Data-Aware: It’s imperative to know where your most sensitive information is located in your system so you can lock it down and protect it in the case of a compromise. Although you might be doing everything right to keep malware out, it’s smart to be prepared for a breach.
- Watch Your Workers: Monitoring the system behaviors of your employees is a good way to uncover repeated attempts to access restricted data or to see other odd behaviors like excessive data dumps.
- Educate Your Staff: Monitoring and controlling access can go a long way toward protection, but sometimes damage can be done when an employee doesn’t know better. Train your workers to know what to look for, what to do when they see something suspicious, when to be concerned about coworkers’ behavior. Make security awareness part of your company’s culture rather than forcing compliance through occasional training. If you and your team live it every day, everyone will play a part in battling threats.
Protecting your data is essential for any business and it starts with knowledge. Digital attacks can be malicious or accidental, but by being proactive you can head them off and keep your employees, your customers, and your livelihood safe.
If you have additional questions or would like to talk to a SIMCO representative, please contact our sales and support team through our contact page or call 1-800-338-9925.
