Check this post if your employees click on phishing links. Learn about overlooked phishing prevention solutions that do the trick.
How To Prevent Your Employees From Clicking On Phishing Links?
It’s no secret that cybersecurity matters – this is the reason why you’re here. After all, over 70% of American companies suffer from phishing attacks.
Since most cybersecurity attacks occur because of employees, they might be a weak link in the chain. So how do you prevent them from following malicious links effectively? Keep reading to find this out.
What Is Phishing In The First Place?
Phishing is a type of cyberattack when a scammer impersonates a reliable institution to deceive their victim. Usually, phishers acquire sensitive information about their victim and deploy malware.
They use dozens of sophisticated schemes, so you will often struggle to differentiate between a reliable sender and a scammer.
Employee Training Doesn’t Help
Training might be the first and quite apparent phishing prevention strategy. You can educate employees on what phishing links look like and teach them not to click on them. You can implement cybersecurity training and emulate phishing threats to raise cybersecurity awareness among your employees. However, training often doesn’t work as intended in practice.
A study shows that while employees want to follow security policies, they still click on fraudulent links. In other words, no matter how you train your workers, they will fall into the phishing trap eventually.
If you’re still not sure whether to rely on training or not, check these key findings from the Webroot report:
- Seventy-nine percent of employees report that they’re aware of phishing attacks and know how to mitigate them.
- Forty-nine percent of those people still click on unidentified links at work.
Given this fact, it’s safe to assume that people overestimate their ability to dodge phishing attacks. It means that managers shouldn’t rely on training specifically. Instead, they have to search for more reliable phishing prevention solutions.
Top 5 Tips To Prevent Your Employees From Following Bad Links
If cybersecurity training doesn’t reduce phishing attacks, you should prevent attackers from reaching your company instead. The Verizon Data Breach Report of 2019 revealed that 94% of all phishing attacks come from emails. So you have to exclude these malicious emails in the first place. Check these phishing prevention strategies that do the trick.
Set Up a Cloud-Based Communication Environment
If most phishing threats come from emails, isolate your workers from them. Let’s imagine a situation. You received an email from your boss. He asked you to pay the supplier company for the delivered goods – all invoices were attached. But it turned out that you sent money to scammers pretending to be your boss.
You can prevent this by exchanging messages, files, and links via a private cloud-based communication service. You can choose from plenty of corporate mail solutions to secure in-business communications and streamline many operations.
Deploy Secure Email Gateways
Secure email getaways prevent malicious emails from reaching your workspace. They scan emails, attachments, and links for malware. The security getaway blocks incoming emails that contain viruses or redirect to malicious websites.
It’s another efficient way to reduce phishing attacks. After all, your employees won’t open scam emails if none of them get to their inbox.
Improve Your Corporate Environment
On average, workers spend three hours a day reading business emails. That’s a lot of time, and you can reduce it by setting up mailing schedules within your company. It will help your workers check their inbox less frequently. They will know when it’s time to read emails. But most importantly, it will help them stay more alert when they receive unscheduled emails.
Improve Security Hygiene within Your Workspace
How many times do your workers change their passwords? Does your organization use two-factor authentication (2FA) for business accounts?
The previously-mentioned Verizon Data Breach Report showed that 28% of security breaches result in stolen login data. So you have to exclude such vulnerabilities within your company. Scammers will have a hard time accessing your business accounts if your organization uses 2FA.
Manage Your Team’s Workload
The excessive workload might be an overlooked factor for increasing phishing attacks. Thus, a 2014 behavioral study revealed that overworked employees were more prone to phishing attacks. Overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted workers couldn’t recognize incoming threats.
So if you want your employees to stop clicking on phishing links, you have to optimize their workload as they find a lot of paid organic backlinks during the day. Check for the following tips to improve the team’s performance:
- Incorporate workflow management tools like Trello and Harvest.
- Evaluate the team’s performance and set deadlines according to its real capacity.
- Reduce activities that steal time from your employees.
The Bottom Line
Combating phishing attacks requires a multi-layered approach. You have to make your employees less exposed to phishing emails, use cloud-based mail solutions, and set up spam filters.
Protect your business accounts better and optimize your team’s performance to make your organization less vulnerable to phishing attacks. Lastly, never consider cybersecurity training the only viable solution. Once you incorporate these tips, you will see measurable improvements pretty soon.
