Security Training for Employees During the Busy Cybershopping Season

Posted by Stephen Palamara, TCC Director of Business Development

With the holiday season upon us, retailers are trying to make the most of cybershopping to boost revenues before the end of the year. However, with extra web traffic the holiday shopping season can be a particularly perilous time for companies seeking to safeguard data.

I read this article posted to the SecurityIntelligence website that was targeted toward retailers, but I think the information on maintaining security can be beneficial to all small businesses. To read the full article, follow this link: https://securityintelligence.com/5-recommendations-to-improve-retail-cybersecurity-this-holiday-season/

The article pointed out that most companies have some kind of data protection training in place. The following are some tips that businesses can use to make training effective during the busy holiday season:

• “Plan for role-based training of all employees in the organization.”
• “Train employees on both physical and digital security.”
• “Conduct short training sessions and field-test them by asking for employee feedback.”
• “Launch an internal phishing campaign: Send a spoofed email from a dummy account with official-sounding names, titles and subjects, and track the number of users who click on the links or attachments. Offer additional training according to the conclusions from the campaign.”
• “Identify users who need remedial training and retest as needed.”
• “Most importantly, provide all users with an easily accessible resource to report issues. Users should be able to contact IT security with any question or suspicion.”

The article encourages management to support awareness campaigns and find opportunities to educate users, because vigilant employees make mitigating attacks during the holiday season that much more effective. An example of a way to make training more interesting is gifting a security-themed mug to employees who complete security training for the holiday season.

To learn more about TCC’s IT Managed Services and Cybersecurity please visit our website https://e-tcc.com/managed-services.