Knowing what your employees are up to, enables you to strengthen your security policies.
We all make mistakes at work from time to time. And sometimes we do things we know we shouldn’t. In the fast paced modern world, it’s easy enough to send an email to the wrong person or end up taking company information home. Often the consequences will be a bit of embarrassment, but every now and again they can be devastating for the organization.
Part of running a modern business is understanding where your risks lie and finding straightforward ways to mitigate them. This means both educating staff in working securely and putting in technological safeguards for when things go wrong.
To help both IT and business managers better understand this, Clearswift asked 4,000 people worldwide what common security faux pas they had made.
| We have been counting down the results in our Seven Deadly Sins of Cyber Security over the last week. Here is a quick recap: | ||
|---|---|---|
| 7 | Information without borders | 7% of employees have knowingly shared sensitive business information with a third-party, and 5% have taken sensitive business information with them when leaving their job. |
| 6 | Bring your own risk | 12% of employees have caused a breach by losing a company device and a further 12% have done so by losing a personal device with sensitive information on it. 19% confessed to using insecure personal email and/or cloud apps to store work documents. |
| 5 | Sharing isn’t always caring | 17% have shared their passwords with others at work and 13% would loan someone else their work device to use, opening up access to their private information. |
| 4 | Keep it locked up | 19% said they leave PCs unlocked for an extended periods of time, even over night, allowing anyone to jump on and potentially steal information or compromise their machine. |
| 3 | Still clicking those dodgy links? | 20% have downloaded a file that contained a virus to a work computer. Once a machine is compromised – who knows what it could be used for! |
| 2 | One less thing to remember | 23% say they use the same passwords across work and home applications. So if a personal login is lost or stolen, your company network could be compromised too. |
| 1 | The wrong Dave | Our most common faux pas, 42% of employees have sent an email to the wrong person. If this is information about a colleague it could be pretty embarrassing. If it is customer details it could mean loss of business or legal action. If it’s IP it could mean the end of the business. Always check before you hit send. |