Following the pandemic, remote jobs have become an essential part of maintaining your business operations. While working remotely is convenient, it makes you and your employees more susceptible to hacking and phishing attacks. The biggest difference between working in an office and working remotely is the security level of the networks you connect to.

While most employees don’t have a malicious intent of compromising company data, it still happens unknowingly and regularly. For the sake of avoiding these breaches in security, let’s examine the most common ways that employees have accidentally leaked sensitive company information .

Signing Onto Public Networks

When some people think of working remotely, they imagine themselves sitting in a coffee shop or traveling the world with their laptop at their side, able to connect at any given moment to work on their tasks. Depending on your company’s policies, this could very well be acceptable for your team, but it has one drawback: public WiFi. 

While convenient, signing into public WiFi on a company computer isn’t exactly the safest thing to do. Most public WiFi isn’t secure at all and is one of the most popular ways that hackers can gain access to public and private computers. Basically it’s a first class ticket for those hackers to gain all your information and data. 

To combat this issue, if signing into public WiFi is a necessity for your employees, invest in a Virtual Private Network (VPN).  VPNs are popular in the workplace to prevent any attacks, as you have to be connected to it to get into your company’s computer network. 

Personal Devices

Many employees use their own phones and personal computers to check and respond to work emails. The one downfall of this is that they don’t definitively have password protection nor antivirus software to protect the confidential information they have access to. This is a great opportunity for attackers to compromise all your data. 

Make sure your employees are using difficult passwords and multi-factor authentication for their laptops and phones they are using for any work-related activities. 

Opening Suspicious Emails

Scam emails have been around for a long time, and what once was an obvious malicious email can now be disguised as an insider at your company, which is a common way that hackers are gaining access to a business’ system. Phishing emails are known to trick the recipient into thinking the email is from their own company, or even a reputable company. Once the recipient clicks the link provided, everything has been breached.

Several ways to know for sure if the email is fake include:

• Misspelled name of the company
• Misspelled words or sentences that don’t make sense
• Grandiose promotions and offers

Be on the lookout for these signs, and regularly remind your employees about these tell-tale signs to ensure no one falls for these email scams.

Creating Weak Passwords

While it might seem like an inconvenience to your employees to create a difficult password, it’s actually very important when wanting to decrease your risk of a data breach. Passwords need to be pretty difficult to prevent hackers from guessing them, which is why many websites require at least one upper case letter, a number, a special character and a certain length to even be accepted. This is not only for your safety, but for that site’s liability purposes as well. 

Encourage your employees to create difficult passwords, and make sure they are regularly updating them – about every three months is a good indicator to update a password. 

Surfing The Web

What seems like a harmless activity to do during breaks or when things are slow at work can actually be pretty harmful to your system. Just browsing the web can be detrimental to your business information. In the past, many companies used to block certain websites on their servers, but nowadays it’s a lot harder to determine which websites are harmful or not. 

Installing antivirus software should help against hackers, but also be sure to train your employees about the dangers of clicking untrustworthy links or navigating to websites that aren’t related to work. This helps you cover all your bases for your business to prevent hackers from getting into your systems or having spyware accidentally downloaded.

Get A Solution

Whether you’re having software issues, connection problems or need help keeping your business safe from hackers and potential data breaches, our team at Prenew IT Consulting can help you out at an affordable price. Whatever your business’ IT needs may be, large or small, basic or more advanced, we can do it.

We ensure your business is safe from the harmful threats that the internet brings. We have antivirus software, spyware protection, email protection and network security to make your business a safe venture. Call Prenew today to schedule a consultation and let us see what we can do to help you and your business be the safest it can be.