The Importance of Staff Training in your Business IT Support

The Phishing Activity Trends Report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group shows that in the first quarter of 2022, the charity observed a total of 1,025,968 cyberattacks. This was their highest count on record for a single quarter, indicating that cyberattacks are growing in both frequency and threat.

According to the Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report, almost half (48%) of all businesses say they faced at least one cyberattack in 2021, and the median cost of a cyberattack to a business was nearly $17,000 (just over £14,000 according to exchange rates in July 2022).

One of the most common methods of cyberattack is phishing, which targets your employees rather than your software. How can you ever relax considering most managed cyber security services don’t protect your employees? Read on to find out.

Your employees are the most at-risk part of your cyber security defences

Your cyber security systems need to cover every possible access point of your business. For you, this might include a robust and effective antivirus, advanced endpoint protection, consistent network monitoring, and an encrypted password management system.

But one thing you might not think about is that your employees need protecting just as much as your software does. In fact, the World Economic Forum states that 95% of successful cyberattacks can be traced back to human error.

Phishing is the most common way of targeting the humans behind the system, rather than the system itself. Phishing is the process of impersonating a brand or individual and sending out fake emails that look genuine to potential victims.

Someone may choose to impersonate an employee’s supervisor, a correspondent from a third-party partner, a prospective client, and more.

While most phishing attempts will be picked up and dealt with by the security systems of your mail apps themselves, so many are sent every single day that some may still slip through the cracks.

In these instances, it takes just one employee to divulge some confidential information, such as company passwords or logins, for your data to be compromised. At which point, your data could be sold on the dark web, and you may never even find out.

Identify the patterns of malicious communications

Compromised data is a business owner’s worst nightmare, and to think one of your employees could be responsible makes it even worse. To stop worrying about whether this could happen to you, you need business IT support services with a focus on consistent, effective, and convenient employee training.

Since human error is the leading cause of successful cyberattacks, it’s strange that so few business IT support packages come with any form of employee training. By helping your employees learn to identify and shut down malicious communications, you could greatly reduce your chances of being the next victim. 

To help put your fears to rest, our managed IT support offers comprehensive, company-wide, and unobtrusive cyber security training. We meticulously recreate the methods and strategies a genuine hacker may employ and go to great lengths to ensure that everything we produce is recreated accurately.

We regularly send fake phishing emails to every employee in your business at random times, to keep them on their toes. This helps your employees recognise some of the key features and patterns in phishing communications and helps teach them the best way to deal with it.

Some of the things you might want to look out for are obscured or incorrect email addresses, grammar or spelling mistakes, and a shift in how the impersonated individuals normally speak.  

You may also want to encourage a collaborative culture within the workplace, where employees feel empowered and are encouraged to check with their colleagues over any suspicious emails. 

Ongoing training is the best way to bolster your defences

But a few emails aren’t going to be enough to protect your whole business, especially if someone has already handed over important data in one of our tests.

If that does happen, they will be considered “at risk” of falling for a genuine phishing email. From there, we will provide additional, simple training videos that the employee can watch according to their schedule.

These videos help cover cyber security essentials and go into more detail about how to identify and deal with phishing emails. They are easy to follow and are designed to be fitted into your employee’s busy schedule without impacting their workload.

This process is repeatable, and we will constantly monitor every employee’s response even after we are confident that everyone understands what to do in phishing situations. If anyone makes a mistake again, then they will be identified and management will be notified, and the training videos will still be there to use.

Contact us

If you’d like more information on how our cyber security package works or how else we could help your business, email info@boldit.co.uk or call us on 0121 355 4474.

Even if you aren’t based in Birmingham, IT support is crucial, and we provide remote IT support across the UK – get in touch no matter where you are!