This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s probably anything but to many members of your team. According to a 2015 survey conducted by TeleSign, close to 75% of consumers use duplicate passwords in their online activity. Twenty-one percent of them use passwords more than a decade old, 47% have been using the same password for five years and a whopping 54% use the same five passwords across an entire lifetime online. 

If your practice is going to survive a digital onslaught, safe online practices for your employees need to be more than a recommendation. They need to be mandatory firm policies. Every new and existing employee needs to know what’s expected of them and what the consequences will be if they deviate from guidelines. For example, when an update comes through for a key piece of software, it needs to be installed immediately. Have a set procedure in place for them to follow if they encounter a suspicious e-mail or potentially malicious link. These and other practices, when set in stone, ensure that employees remain personally invested in protecting your firm.

The best way to suss out any employee vulnerabilities, though, will always be to do a thorough security audit of all your systems. This means investigating the hardware and software you’re using on a daily basis, sure, but most importantly, you need to analyse the habits of your personnel and whether or not they’re complying with your high standards of cyber security.

As they say, forewarned is forearmed. This is never truer than when defending your business from data breaches. With comprehensive cyber security awareness training, outlining everything from the biggest digital threats to post-breach best practices, you can turn your biggest security liability into your greatest defense. If employees know the ins and outs of hackers’ tricks, it becomes exponentially more difficult for hackers to trick them and find a way into your network.

Is Your Firm Susceptible To Being Hacked?