Phishing attacks come in many different forms to businesses. You can spend a significant amount of money on IT support for small and midsize businesses, but if your employees aren’t educated about how phishing attacks occur, then you will be just as vulnerable as anyone else. Hackers will always target small businesses, but by following these simple tips, you’ll be able to protect your employees, and your business, from phishing.
Use Proper Training Techniques
Talking to your employees in a training session could help, or they could zone out and not understand the importance of the topic. Sometimes mock scenarios are the best ways to help employees understand what to look for in a phishing attack. It’s important for them to understand phishing attacks can come by way of email, popup advertisements, phone calls and many other forms.
Since the negative impact of a phishing attack is so severe, it may be worth your time and money to hire IT consulting services to come educate your employees and provide real-life examples of the impacts.
Tell Employees What To Do With Suspicious Emails
Telling your employees what to look for and what to do with suspicious emails are two different things. Your company may get a large variety of emails coming from potential clients or customers that may be legitimate.
One step you could inform them about is to hover over any links in the email, or the email address it was sent from, to see the legitimacy of it. It’s easy for IT consulting services to tell your employees what to look for and what to do when a suspicious email pops up.
Require Strong Passwords and Change Them Frequently
Some of the most basic IT security services practices include making your employees create strong passwords and make sure they know not to keep the same one for more than a few weeks at a time. Requiring special characters or case sensitivity in passwords is one of the best ways to protect from phishing attacks.
Hackers are good at compromising someone’s email account and sending phishing emails from it. If an employee receives an email from someone they know, they may not even think twice about opening it. Strong passwords could prevent those attacks from happening in the first place.
Phishing attacks happen to businesses of any size every single day. The best way to protect your company is to inform and educate your employees. Be sure to contact us for more tips on how to do this in the most effective way possible.