Entrepreneur this week released its "Best Practices for Employees to Protect the Company From Hackers". The article contains some great tips for franchise businesses to implement for avoiding data breaches through employee conduct. This is critically helpful information during a time where major data breaches seem to pop up on the news every day.
So many articles discuss what businesses should do from a high level management perspective focusing on implementing sophisticated changes to technology, data collection and storage policies and practices. In this article, however, the writer, Dick Anderson, focuses on what EMPLOYEES should do to protect themselves and their employers.
Mr. Anderson opens with a description of phishing exercises he conducts for clients where results show that 70% or more employees will follow a link to a bogus site and of those that follow the link, 30-50% give up their usernames and passwords!
Many of the tips should be common sense to most people such as making sure that employees are not using work computers for personal business and keeping browsers, and plug-ins (such as Adobe Flash or Java) updated. The article also contains some lesser known recommendations and provides a blunt and honest look at how employees are an easy target for hackers looking to get past a company's security controls.
To read the entire article on Entrepreneur.com, you can click here.
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