Protecting your employees from online threats is an excellent way to build and maintain a secure working environment. Equipping your workforce with the knowledge and tools necessary to protect themselves online can foster your working relationship, improving their productivity. Protection is even more critical if you have a distributed workforce or a hybrid workplace, as they may be exposed to more risk.
Let’s explore some tips and strategies you can use today to protect your workforce from the risks of an ever-evolving cyberthreat landscape.
Keep All Software and Systems Updated
Outdated software is a common vector for cyberattacks. However, with timely updates and proper patching schedules, you prevent cybercriminals from exploiting your systems using common vulnerabilities and zero-day attacks.
To effectively ensure all your software and systems stay updated, automate patching with tools to ensure you receive timely updates. Deploy these patching tools across all your operating systems, embedded systems and applications. Prioritize critical updates that patch high-risk vulnerabilities which expose your business to devastating attacks.
Set up a controlled environment to test patches before deploying them, ensuring they are stable first. This prevents system instability or conflicts, which may cause downtime or expose you to further risks of attack. Additionally, monitor your systems regularly with vulnerability scanners to identify gaps for rapid patching.
Educate Your Employees on Safe Browsing Habits
You can never overstate the need for comprehensive cybersecurity training for your employees. Over 95% of all cybersecurity breaches result from human error, which makes training a critical tool for curbing cyberthreats. Not only is training a strong preventative measure, but it also saves any costs you may otherwise incur remediating cyberattacks.
Cybersecurity training makes your teams the first line of defence, enabling them to recognize and respond to security incidents effectively and in a timely fashion. Here are concepts your training program should cover:
- Password security and management, including creating strong, unique passwords and using password managers
- Phishing recognition and awareness to help identify suspicious websites, links, and emails.
- Proper incident reporting procedures to help staff report and remediate suspected incidents appropriately.
- Safe browsing habits to help them reduce the surface of attack across all company endpoints.
Keep your training sessions ongoing, updating them to match the evolving cybersecurity landscape. It also keeps your team members fresh and alert throughout their period in your company.
Implement DNS Filtering Solutions
DNS filtering is a proactive cybersecurity solution that helps your employees block access to malicious websites and applications. It works by preventing domain names of suspicious websites from resolving into IP addresses, and can be a powerful first-line defence against phishing attacks, malware and ransomware.
Implementing this strategy is pretty straightforward. To begin, set clear content policies that specify which categories of websites should be blocked. Once done, deploy a DNS filtering solution with real-time threat monitoring using your policies to configure it. Keep this web filter updated, ensuring all block lists are current with industry threat intelligence standards.
Where possible, activate your web-filter’s AI-powered features for faster threat detection. Moreover, use your DNS filtering solution to optimize your bandwidth usage, blocking unnecessary traffic and reducing network latency.
Deploy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
MFA can significantly harden your system security, as it involves adding multiple layers of verification. If your employees lose their credentials in a phishing or credential stuffing attack, their accounts still remain relatively secure. Without the additional factor such as biometrics or a code sent to a secure device, the attackers remain locked out.
Typically, MFa combines credentials from:
- Password, PIN, or answers to security questions
- A smartphone or hardware token, a smart card, or a one-time code sent via SMS or email
- Biometric data such as fingerprints, facial recognition, or voice patterns
Set up a user-friendly MFA solution that fits into your employee’s workflow. Once done, use training seminars, demonstrations and documentation to teach them how to integrate MFA into their accounts. Ensure the MFA solutions are themselves up to date with active support.
When combined with other existing security solutions, MFA can further harden your company from evolving cyberattacks. It adds an etra layer of security, making it harder for your systems to be breached.
Set Up Secure Network Infrastructure
Secure connections protect data in transit, ensuring your network traffic is protected from intrusion and interception. A secure network encrypts data traffic, creating secure tunnels for your employees, especially if you have remote or hybrid workers using public or unsecured connections.
You can secure networks in several ways:
- Deploy Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for remote workers. VPNs encrypt network traffic from all your remote employees’ devices, enabling them to communicate, share files and transact securely from home networks or public Wi-Fi.
- Use Endpoint Security Solutions to secure all your business endpoints, including smartphones, laptops, servers, and IoT devices. These solutions offer comprehensive threat detection and response, vulnerability scanning and application control. They protect your systems from intrusion, automatically remediating most malware and ransomware attacks.
Create Data Backups and A Recovery Plan
A solid data backup and recovery plan is a key component of any cybersecurity strategy. In the unfortunate case you lose data to a ransomware attack,natural disasters, system failure or human error, you mitigate the risk of downtime and increase your chances of successful business continuity.
Create a backup schedule according to your business objectives. Identify crucial business data and determine the frequency of backups. This may vary from real-time to hourly or daily. Automate your backups, only checking in to monitor for efficiency, consistency and to reduce errors.
Use the 3-2-1 rule to maintain 3 copies of your data on 2 different types of storage media, with 1 copy stored offsite. Use encryption and isolate your backups main systems. Where possible, use air-gapped or offline backups for added security.
Once done, test your backups for reliability. Practice recovery procedures with your employees, and simulate real-life scenarios to prepare them for future data restoration. You can also conduct drills to improve response times to reduce future downtime.
