How to Help Your Employees Recognize Email Fraud (So You Don’t Get Phished!)  

Email is one of the major vulnerabilities that cybercriminals are using to attack small businesses in 2022.  

And unfortunately, no matter how robust your cyber-defenses are, you can’t completely prevent human error. This means that human error represents one of the biggest threats to your security infrastructure.  

And that’s why it’s so important that you’re consistently investing time and resources into training your team (and yourself!) to build good habits and help them avoid falling prey to the bad guys. 

As IT security professionals, one of the ways that we serve our clients is by organizing and implementing ongoing training for their teams – and conducting ongoing testing to ensure that they’re staying sharp.  

Step one is training – and we typically deliver this information on a monthly basis to keep employees up-to-speed and make sure they’re aware of the strategies that the bad guys are using.  

But we don’t stop there, and you shouldn’t either. We test our clients’ employees throughout the month by sending phishing messages, attempting to trick them into clicking links or sharing information that they shouldn’t be sharing. Just like the bad guys do. And then we identify any employees who may “fall for” the trick. We don’t do this to be punitive – like I’ve said, any one of us can make a mistake. Instead, we do it so that we know who needs more training and so that we know what type of training they need. Ultimately we’re doing this to identify potential vulnerabilities and help to mitigate them.  

By the way, last year we published a blog entry that could be very helpful for you. It’s a detailed breakdown of actual email “phishing” attacks that our clients have experienced, along with our commentary. Please, review this resource and then feel free to share it with your employees and anyone else you know who could benefit. Here’s the blog entry.  

The bottom line is that human error is a serious threat to the security of your business. A simple, momentary lapse in judgment can compromise your internal data, it can compromise sensitive data, and it can do serious damage to your business operations and even your reputation in the community.  

That’s why it’s so important that you take a proactive approach to this threat. It’s impossible to completely prevent human error – but with systematic training and testing, you can greatly reduce the chances of it occurring.  

If you’d like to have a conversation about your cybersecurity plan, my team and I are here to help. Please reach out to us via email at info@weareproactive.com or 704-464-3075 extension 3.         

Dedicated to IT security and productivity,     

– Steve