Minimizing the Extent of Insider Risks

Minimizing the Extent of Insider Risks

Insider risks is one of the biggest threats to any organization and its security. Businesses need to be extra vigilant while setting up compliance policies and tracking employees’ adherence to them.

Workforce and work culture are one of the most significant assets of every organization, which helps businesses scale at a fatser rate. But employees can be the weakest links in the enterprise’s IT security, which might have a catastrophic impact on the organization. It is crucial for businesses to set stringent security hygiene practices to develop cyber-secure work culture.

A report released by Apricorn titled “2022 IT SECURITY SURVEY RESULTS” suggests that one-fourth of IT security leaders state that their resources are not complying with the security policies and processes, despite the increasing threats. The statistics are concerning because there has been an exponential increase in the number of cyberattacks since the start of the pandemic. Here are a few ways to ensure the workforce is compliant with the security hygiene policies set by the CISOs:

Educate employees on how to detect and avoid phishing attacks

Spreading awareness and educating employees on how to identify phishing attacks is one of the most effective ways to minimize the internal risk. SecOps teams need to inform the entire workforce about not clicking on the suspicious links in the fraudulent messages received on email or other communication platforms. 

Furthermore, it is essential to train the workforce on how to be vigilant while dealing with malicious emails, unrecognized pop-ups, and downloading attachments from unknown senders. Training resources on identifying the red flags and notifying them to the SecOps teams enhance the security hygiene practices of the organization. Implanting a security and compliance-focused mindset in all the employees is an essential need that organizations need to invest in, so insider threats can be reduced.

Also Read: Insider Threats: Top Four Ways to Protect Enterprises

Enhance email security and compliance 

Emails are one of the most used communication tools by modern enterprises to share, store and process sensitive information. Hence, it is crucial to set up top-notch email security to avoid sensitive data leakage.

Email encryptions will ensure that unauthorized users outside the business network cannot view or tamper with the emails. Organizations also can consider setting stringent password combinations and updating the passwords regularly to avoid infiltration. Effective email archiving solutions and email retention policies will assist businesses in being compliant with the existing policies and optimum data storage. 

Implement a compliance automation tool

Compliance management can be a tedious task requiring constant audits, which is why ensuring 100% compliance is a challenging task to accomplish manually. The same report of Apricorn Software suggests that nearly 40% of the survey respondents do not have tools to monitor and enforce compliance policies. But 56% of the businesses are reinvesting in training employees, while 83% constantly reinforce policies with the workforce.

It will be a difficult task for organizations to train and inform the workforce about compliance and its changes regularly. Resources will already be overwhelmed with multiple tasks to accomplish, and keeping the compliance policies in mind while completing daily work can be challenging. Moreover, tracking and monitoring each employee’s activities daily manually will be unproductive and time-consuming. Compliance automation tools will streamline the compliance management process and reduce human errors. 

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