When educating your employees about cybersecurity, starting their cybersecurity awareness training on the first day of employment can help prevent malicious attacks from happening. Knowing the different attacks that could happen can make employees aware of what to look for and how to prevent endangering important information.
This week, we have reviewed Cybersecurity Awareness Training and different cybersecurity threats. We are here to review the last topic of How to Educate Your Employees About Cybersecurity with today's topic: Enforcing Specific Technology Guidelines and Exercises.
Enforcing Specific Technology Guidelines and Exercises
Cybersecurity guidelines are important when keeping vital information safe from hackers. Don’t just tell employees to use better passwords but show them how to make them better. The more details you give them, the better they will understand the technology guidelines you present.
Some guidelines and exercises to follow are:
- Never provide login credentials: Stress the importance to your employees to NEVER share their login credentials, even if the email appears to come from someone in the company. If an employee thinks a coworker sent the email, they should contact the sender by phone or talk to them in person to verify.
- Use Strong Passwords: Always have your employees use strong passwords by showing them different examples of how a password should look. One suggestion to create secure passwords is to use sentences that replace some letters with numbers, symbols, and use both lower- and upper-case letters. The longer the password, the safer it will be from those who may try to crack it. Every 90 days, change your passwords across all accounts. Changing your passwords will help prevent malicious attacks from happening to your data. Keeping track of changing passwords can be a big challenge for some, but you can solve this by using a password manager app that functions as a digital notebook to keep track of each password. If you write them on paper, store them in a locked location. Never allow passwords to be saved in a Word document or email! These places are vulnerable to hackers.
- Regularly scan your computer for viruses: Just having antivirus on your company computer will not help if the workers turn off scanning or do not have automatic updates. Require your employees to set their virus-blocking software and operating system to update automatically.
- Use Multi-factor Authentication: Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) sends a code to a person’s phone, email address, or app whenever they try to log into a site or server. The user then enters the code they receive to verify that someone else did not steal their information. This process makes it harder for a third party to take login information and use it because every login must be verified by the specific user.
Educating your employees on the importance of cybersecurity awareness can help prevent you and your organization from experiencing data breaches. In addition, it can also increase the security of your personal data, such as bank accounts and subscriptions.
We hope this information has been helpful to your understanding of how to safeguard your data by educating your employees. Contact us to learn more about cybersecurity and to discuss your system's security measures for preventing malicious attacks.