Just like everything else for your employees, you cannot rely on one simple training session. Employees have a short memory, especially when it comes to things that they are not responsible for. This is where you will need to change your training regimen and corporate culture. In order to prevent phishing emails from wreaking havoc on your business, a number of initiatives must be ensured for the protection of your network security. Training your employees effectively and continuously can help.
Scheduled & Regular
One of the major downfalls of small and medium enterprises is that they do not follow the lead of large enterprises in regards to training and development. Part of this may be budgeting concerns for smaller businesses, but just as large businesses spend a percentage of revenues on employee retention and development, so should you.
Training and development needs to be a core tenet of your business to increase employee satisfaction, address weak links within your employee knowledge base and to boost employee performance. A simple 1 hour training session, quarterly on the necessary security measures needed to avoid phishing emails could demonstrate a commitment to network security. In these IT training seminars, you could cover a number of issues, with phishing emails being just one of them.
Up-to-Date Information
Any training seminar that becomes a regular feature within your development training needs to be updated. If you are simply providing the same information four times a year without updating it, your employees will not bother with updating their knowledge either.
Find out the latest statistics in the industry and provide feedback to employees about your own email security statistics. How many phishing attacks has the company had? How much lost production because of these attacks? Could this lost revenue affect bonuses or raises? Tie in your training to a solution or a problem for the company and most employees will want to help out for their own interests.
Mix it Up
Have you used the same meeting format to teach the same general principles regarding how to avoid phishing emails? You should look at trying to change up how the information is presented.
Instead of printing out sheets for a meeting, take smaller groups to a live demonstration of how to avoid phishing emails. Use a company computer with active spam and see how employees avoid these potential security threats.
Teach how to identify suspected emails by actually identifying them in your own email boxes. By presenting the information in different ways, even though the message is the same, people will be more interested in learning. Inform employees that if they are ever unsure about a specific email, that not opening the email can be the best answer. Establish clear protocols on how to handle spam can help reduce phishing attacks as well.
By employing third-party anti-spam filtering software like ModusGate you can even prevent most spam from even reaching your employees mail boxes. Eliminate most your spam issues before they start and ensure the rest never become a problem by training employees in an effective and continuous way.
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