By now, most employees are familiar with the standard advice on technology usage: change your password into a hard-to-guess combination of letters, numbers and symbols, don’t click on any web links in a suspicious email, and refrain from downloading free apps onto the company servers.
While these are important, security is a constantly changing field, as IT knows all too well (The Secret Costs of Your Email Security). So having employees implement some additional protection into their email habits can go a long way toward keeping an enterprise safe. Here are some top tips to share:
1. Don’t sign up for unnecessary downloads.
One of the top ways that marketers collect leads is by offering useful information — such as a helpful e-book about managing your email time better. If this is a legitimate organization that users trust and will want to hear from again, they should feel free to sign up. But employees should be wary of handing out their email addresses freely. For example, giving an email address in order to get the results of a personality quiz or to find out how they scored in an online game. This just increases the risk of spammers capturing those addresses and selling them, resulting in much more email in the future.
2. Understand junk email filters.
Whether the employee is using Outlook and its spam filters or another program, it’s important for everyone at the company to know how to set filters at a higher level, even if IT has set a company-wide filter level. This will give employees knowledge about how to check the filters for legitimate emails, create safe lists, and reduce unwanted messages. Because those emails aren’t getting through, the enterprise will have higher security protection levels.
3. Watch for shoulder surfing.
Think of this as a low-tech way to gain some high-tech assets. Your employee might be typing a work email while sitting on the bus or standing in a grocery line, unaware that someone is right behind her, reading the information. A survey of U.K. commuters found that 72 percent of respondents have done shoulder surfing, and 20 percent of them have seen confidential or highly sensitive information. Security experts have voiced concern that these surfers don’t just read emails or look at reports, they can also see passwords and login information. That means a criminal could gain access to your email system by using a legitimate employee login, and you might not know about any damage until later.
4. Log out when leaving.
Some offices have hundreds, even thousands, of employees who create plenty of internal foot traffic every day. Added to that are interns, temps, contract workers, guests, maintenance workers, vendors, and clients. With open floor plans and cubicles, employees rarely have the luxury of locking up computers at the end of the day, but they can create an extra measure of safety by logging out when they know they’ll be leaving for extended periods — for example, lunch or meetings. By logging out of email, they won’t be leaving sensitive information exposed when they’re away from their desks, minimizing potential internal threats.
Sendio’s Opt-Inbox™ effectively filters your emails so your employees only receive the messages they want. Your security is bolstered, and the company’s productivity is optimized. Help your employees to implement better security controls and feel productive again. Add Opt-Inbox™ to your company’s email filtering to protect your organization. Click here to get started.
