Dealing with hackers is already a very stressful thing for all cybersecurity experts. On top of it, when hackers exploit the soft targets of the company – the employees – things go even worse. Wondering why? Well, that’s because hackers don’t even need very high skills to target employees. Even a beginner from the dark side of the web can use social engineering – a type of phishing attack – to target the employees of the company, and not the network.
No matter how rude it might sound, only informed employees are assets, the others are risks. Wondering how to make up for this vulnerability – uninformed employees – to secure your company from hackers? If yes, then the only way is to educate them about what phishing is, how and why hackers target them, and the different ways in which they can improve cybersecurity of the company.
The Different Benefits of Teaching Your Employees about Phishing
Do you know that online threat actors stole about $1.7 billion from innocent users using a phishing technique that’s known as BEC in 2019? Did you know that many organizations lose $130,000 to social engineering attacks yearly? If you didn’t, now you do. Which also clearly means that you should know that investing money to make your employees aware of phishing attacks is a necessity.
Here are the benefits of doing so.
- Employees who know that hackers use targeted emails to install malware in a system refrain from clicking on links that come in the email body.
- When employees understand the risk, they always refrain from clicking on attachments that come from unsolicited sources. Those attachments could lead to a malicious website or it could be a Trojan horse. Which is why employees who understand the basics of phishing report such shady emails to the cybersecurity team without wasting any time.
That said, there is another way in which you can strengthen the cybersecurity of the systems on which your employees work. This anti-phishing technique, known as MFA, can increase cybersecurity by strengthening the backdoor password.
What is MFA implementation?
MFA is a very new technique of guarding the information in a system by keeping the system behind at least 3 authentication factors. These authentication factors are the security layers that have to be cleared for the user to click open the system and access the information stored inside. If a hacker is targeting your employees but the system has MFA enabled, getting access to the system by breaching just the backdoor password won’t be sufficient.
To sum up, informed employees can guard the data of a company very well. Hence, spending money on arranging for cybersecurity sessions is a good idea to protect your assets from hackers.
