Every business is vulnerable to social engineering attacks. Even with state-of-the-art cyber security software, a highly trained IT team, and vigilant staff members, it is always possible that one small slip-up could cost your organization thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Fortunately, there are simple ways to help prevent potential attacks. Following these simple steps could help preserve your organization’s bottom line, prevent a huge headache for your IT staff, and protect your organization’s important data.
1. Implement multi-factor authentication
Every organization should have multi-factor authentication enabled. Passwords leak on a regular basis, and many are reused. Quarterly password changes will not stop employees from reusing easy-to-guess passwords that they’ve used on countless other websites. Make sure multi-factor authentication is required to access company servers, ideally with a phone number or a physical RSA security key.
2. Hold quarterly social engineering awareness seminars
In today’s mostly online workforce, employees need to be efficient when sharing documents with stakeholders, and sometimes the urgency of requests takes priority over the logical reason for the request. Holding quarterly social engineering awareness seminars or classes will help keep cyber security at the front of everyone’s mind, and having it done regularly ensures that something as important as protecting internal assets isn’t only done once at onboarding.
3. Run phishing simulations to assess vulnerability level
If your company has a dedicated email address to forward spam emails to (which it should), perform phishing simulations to assess the risk level of your organization. See what departments need improving, and run different simulations to keep everyone on their toes. Doing so will help make sure that the staff is always looking for a threat, whether it be artificial or legitimate.
4. Increase your organization’s spam filter strictness
Spam filters can be annoying for staff as sometimes important genuine emails will get lost in the shuffle. Tweak your spam filters and always make adjustments to find that sweet spot of minimizing potential threats.
5. Require additional authentication procedures when dealing with critical assets
If you are dealing with important documents that contain sensitive internal information or client PII, require that the document is password protected and only give out that password either in-person or over the phone so you can verify that the person it is going to is legit. This doesn’t need to be done on all documents, but sensitive assets need to be handled with more care than others.