Protect Your Organization, And Your Reputation, From Cybercriminals By Starting From The Inside-out
Cybersecurity is a common concern in many businesses and companies anxious about protecting their networks and assets. While it’s easy to look outside and think about what the external world brings to your business, it’s even more important to consider how your internal structure affects your cybersecurity. Protecting your organization needs to start from the human risk. At Realized Solutions, we help you keep your business safe by starting with your internal structure.
The Risk of Human Error
Statistics show that human error is the leading cause of data breaches among organizations. For example, 92% of security incidents and 84% of security breaches are caused by inadvertent human error.
Notable breaches include the 2017 Equifax data breach, which exposed private records of approximately 146 million Americans after employees failed to employ software fixes which caused vulnerabilities in the company’s security.
What’s more, hackers use employee’s vulnerabilities against your business. For example, phishing is a common attack that targets unsuspecting workers with emails that appear valid, redirects them to malicious sites, asks for sensitive information, or asks workers to download malware.
According to the FBI, phishing attacks were the most common cybersecurity attacks in 2020. The attacks almost doubled in frequency from 114,702 incidents in 2019 to 241,324 incidents in 2020. Attackers are exploiting internal vulnerabilities to attack your organization. In addition, 74% of phishing attacks against organizations are successful.
With these statistics in mind, organizations and businesses must assess their human risk and find ways to fortify themselves. Are your employees aware of the risks? How can you avoid cybersecurity incidents due to human error?
Employee Vulnerability Assessment
Keeping your cyberspace space begins with educating yourself and your employees. Employee vulnerability assessment (EVA) empowers your employees by boosting their knowledge.
An EVA evaluates each employee per key security metrics into one Employee Secure Score (ESS). As such, you’ll know which of your employees presents the highest risk and focus your effort there. Realized Solutions provides EVAs. Our approach considers the following:
- We use short, easy-to-digest, and understand videos and quizzes to educate and test employees virtually. Once done with the training and testing, we also organize an annual training course to keep your employees’ knowledge updated.
- We continually monitor the dark web to check for business credentials, private information, account information, and scan family and friends’ details.
- We use AutoPhish to simulate phishing attacks and train employees.
- We help you create a cybersecurity policy and encourage employees to acknowledge the policy to improve their ESS score and encourage a faster understanding of risks.
Dark Web Protection
Hackers access private data and publish it on the dark web for sale and manipulation by other malicious users. While you may take critical measures to protect yourself, hackers may continually use exposed private information against you. What’s more, leaked records can cause damage beyond cybersecurity in your business. For example, exposed client or employee financial records expose people to identity theft and fraud.
Continuous dark web monitoring ensures that there are ongoing checks for your private information on the dark web. If any information appears, you receive notifications, and you can either change your passwords or update your security.
The checks can look for information such as your driver’s license, insurance numbers, social security numbers, addresses, email addresses, credit card details, bank account details, phone numbers, maiden names, and full names.
Email Phishing Protection
Phishing is the most common attack technique used by attackers. As such, your employees should be able to identify and avoid falling prey to phishing attacks. There are different types of phishing, including spear-phishing, which uses customized content to target the recipient and use trust against them.
Another example is Business Email Compromise (BEC) which forges email from trusted senders such as banks, financial officers, and clients. Once the recipient sees the email and fails to verify the address, they may give up personal information, approve payments, or transfer funds to scammers.
AutoPhish stimulates phishing attacks for your employees to help them identify email phishing or text phishing scams. We cover aspects such as identifying authentic email addresses, generic greetings, urgent calls and threats to act, suspicious attachments, and poor grammar.
Fortify Human Defenses
Annual security training ensures that your employees are always aware and alert about mistakes and threats at the workplace. In addition, training helps employees understand the importance of cybersecurity and how it impacts businesses and employees. In this way, the workers can take the initiative to protect their details, passwords and identify attacks.
Training also teaches employees about different types of threats such as malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks. The training covers real-life phishing scams, falsified records, and the type of information scammers seek.
In addition, continuous training covers the importance of passwords and password security, employee verification, password managers, and how to create strong passwords. According to the LastPass Psychology of Passwords Report, 59% of people reuse the same password, while 91% admit that they know it’s a security risk.
Many employees reuse old passwords or create weak and easy-to-remember passwords that are easy for hackers to crack. Training them on password managers helps them create and save strong passwords that are difficult to guess and crack.
Lastly, the training covers policies around email, documents, and passwords. Your employees should understand the company’s cybersecurity policies to understand their role in protecting the organization.
Documentation Tracking
To ensure your workers are continually aware of the policies, we provide employees with a written policy and a portal where workers can log in and acknowledge their agreements.
Employee Awareness
To ensure continuous employee awareness, we send monthly security newsletters and offer personal dark web scanning instructions to help employees protect themselves at work and home. Involving your employees in cybersecurity actions boosts security in your business and reduces the risk of human error.
Protect Your Business Today
At Realized Solutions, we help you and your workers keep your business safe. We offer training for employees, certificates, dark web scanning, and email phishing protection. Reach out today to protect your business from the inside out.
