The increase in phishing-style online attacks means that employees are becoming one of the most common sources of security and data breaches for businesses. It’s important to make sure that your employees are aware of how these phishing – and other - scams work, so that they don’t unwittingly put your business at risk.

Here are our tips to help you minimise this risk within your team and keep your business ‘cyber safe’:

• Advise staff to treat all unsolicited emails with caution, and never to click on any links they contain. These links could take them to unknown and unsecured websites containing viruses that can infect individual PCs or, in some cases, your entire network. Advise staff not to open attachments in emails that they’re not expecting or that come from people they don’t know, either, as they can embed and spread viruses not only on your network, but also to anyone in their contacts.
• Be cautious – it’s safer to set spam and junk settings to their highest levels and regularly check the folders to recover emails that aren’t spam than to risk emails getting through that could harm your network.
• Make sure staff don’t download and use free software unless you know that it is reputable and safe. Your IT company will advise you on which free software to use and when it’s more prudent to buy software, based on their understanding of your business and its needs.
• Most businesses install firewalls and anti-virus software. That’s all well and good, but you must keep them up to date and run regular security scans to make sure your systems remain safe and secure from ever-evolving methods of cyber attack. Have a process in place to ensure that staff know which alerts to action, and which ones not to.
• Put processes in place to make sure that your staff install the latest software security updates (also known as ‘patches’). Your IT company will be able to advise you on how to do this or, better still, do it on your behalf through your IT support contract.