Cyberattacks – What you need to know and how to prevent them!

Video Transcript:

Email is like air going through your air conditioner condenser. The air has dust which requires a filter to remove it. Without a filter, the dust will cause damage to your AC condenser. Just like your home’s AC filter protects your AC unit from damage, if you don’t have a strong spam filter in place for your employees’ email accounts, spam emails will be more likely to get through and cause damage in the form of a damaging cyberattack.

If employee email accounts aren’t secure or the filter is weak, it’s impossible to keep company data from being at risk. Information can easily enter and escape through the filter.

Given 91% percent of all cyberattacks begin with a phishing email to an unsuspecting victim, it’s essential to have a secure filter in place.

Hackers know that fear works when it comes to cyberattacks. Think of all the emails you receive from what look like companies you know well with an urgent message that your account has been compromised or attention is needed ASAP!

The alarm bells go off and you click the email before taking a moment to check the address that the email was sent from to verify its legitimacy. The damage is done, the link in the email was clicked, and the hackers now have full access to your email account, and maybe even your entire computer system.

This reaction based on fear is very common, and we’re all susceptible to it. This is because our brains are wired from cave men and women days to react swiftly when faced with a threat. Fear and stress are closely associated with a tiny, almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala, and it wants to take over and make us act to stay safe in moments of real or perceived danger. Hackers know this about the human brain and expertly prey on it in cyberattacks.

What if those dangerous emails that put company data at risk never even made it through the filter? Or at least very few managed to make it through. Imagine how much lower your risk of a cyberattack would be? Imagine that you can almost entirely eliminate the biggest weak link – email – to a potential cyberattack.

With simple, low-cost security measures, you can create a secure email filter to keep the majority of nefarious emails from ever hitting your employees’ inboxes. Hackers focus more and more every day on attacks to small- to mid-sized businesses email accounts because they know this is the weak link for most companies. In fact, 46% of all cyber breaches are on businesses with 1,000 or fewer employees. And 61 percent of small to mid-sized businesses are the victims of cyberattacks.

At the end of the day the best line of defense against cyberattacks are your employees. Simple security measures like multi-factor authentication and role-based authentication will go a long way in keeping email and company data secure. T

hat said, employee security training is still a must. Hackers are getting smarter and more sophisticated all the time and some damaging emails may still make it through even the toughest security systems.

The goal is to empower your employees with both technology security measures and training so they can be free to focus on doing their jobs effectively and efficiently.

Learn more about security measures you can put into place to protect your employees’ email and your company’s sensitive data and greatly reduce the risk of a cyberattack.