The Bay Area IT Experts

Here are three tips for reducing human error in the workplace.

Provide Proper Training
Surprisingly enough, if you train your employees properly, you won’t have to worry about them making mistakes; at least, not as much as you would under untrained circumstances. You should take care to properly outline all of your processes in a way that’s easy to understand, including both intensive and routine tasks, as well as having an established workflow for reporting issues or identifying security problems with spam or phishing emails.

Limit User Permissions
Not all users will need the same permissions on their devices. For example, an IT administrator might need admin permissions, but the average user won’t. The same can be said for access to specific data on your network. You should partition off certain information to only those departments that might need it so you can avoid an access issue with other employees. Basically, the fewer permissions a user has on their device or network, the less harm can come of it in the event a hacker manages to sneak their way in.

Use Your Collective Workforce to “Crowdsource” for Quality
We’re sure you’ve heard the phrase “two heads are better than one,” and you’ll be interested to hear that the same phrase can be applied to the workplace. If you have a large project that could use an extra pair of eyes, why not ask your coworkers for a quick glance? It might help putting out a project with glaring errors that you might not notice because you’ve been staring at it for a few weeks straight. You can think of this process as beta testing in a way, as you can determine potential problems with a product before it is actually released to the public. This can prevent a loss of profit from a product or service that’s not ready to be released can bring if it’s thrown out into the world too soon.

If your business wants to cut out the dangers of human error in the workplace, 415 IT can help. To learn more, reach out to us at (415) 295-4898.

Internal Fraud
You may be closer to some scammers than you would have originally thought. It unfortunately isn’t that uncommon for the employees of a business to steal from it, whether its finances or invaluable data. While you will want to be able to trust your employees, as you should, you also need to be realistic and accept that you may inadvertently hire a few bad eggs. This reality means that you need to have measures in place to keep data inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t need it through access control and other solutions.

Excessive Access
On a similar note, your endpoints themselves should be secured against threats, as these devices could easily leave your business vulnerable if no security measures are put in place. Whether an employee leaves their phone on the counter when they pick up their lunch, or someone sneaks into the office and accesses an unattended workstation, your endpoints themselves need a defense of their own to protect your data.

Insecure Applications
If your business is anything like most, you rely on a variety of applications in order to keep it in operation from day-to-day. While these pieces of software are crucial to your productivity, applications developed by third parties or used by a cloud provider may not be as secure as you would prefer. You need to be selective as you settle on solutions to leverage, or you’ll risk your data being compromised.

Human Error and Mismanagement
Finally, we come to one of the biggest issues that any business has: the fact that it has people working for it. Human error and insufficient management of your IT can create some of the most serious issues and enable more to take root. Without an experienced resource to help protect your network, it is left susceptible to threats. On top of this, there is a long history of simple mistakes leading to IT catastrophes to consider as well. While some errors will ultimately be unavoidable, you should impress upon your employees how important it truly is to focus on their work and review everything they do for mistakes.

With a combination of the right solutions and some old-fashioned vigilance, you can help to keep your business safe and secure against the many threats out there. 415 IT can assist you - call (415) 295-4898 to learn about what we can do for you.

Before anything else, it’s critical that you understand what makes the concept of a zero-day threat so terrifying. Vulnerabilities are flaws in software that can be used by hackers and cybercriminals to access important information or cause trouble. To do so, malware is used by the hacker, but they generally need an exploitable vulnerability to do so.

Defining Zero-Day Threats
Depending on how long a vulnerability is known by developers, they might have a timeline to resolve the issue by, provided that the attack isn’t currently being used by hackers to cause trouble for businesses. However, a vulnerability that is being used in the wild without a patch or update to resolve the issue means that developers effectively have zero days to respond to the issue without the threat of it being used by hackers.

Zero-day threats are often found by black-hat hackers rather than white-hat cybersecurity researchers who generally report threats to developers, so they can be patched properly. Under the most ideal circumstances, an update can be issued before criminals start to use the vulnerability to their advantage. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen, and hackers might be able to use these vulnerabilities.

Protecting Against These Threats
It might seem impossible to keep your business secure from zero-day threats, and to an extent, you’re right. The easiest and best way to keep your organization as secure as possible is to take proactive measures. This includes updating your business’ technology solutions as frequently as possible whenever a new patch or update is available. This ensures that you are as protected as possible when the moment does come.

One of the most interesting and notable trends regarding zero-day threats is how they are still successful after they have been turned into an n-day vulnerability. An n-day vulnerability is one that has been discovered and fixed, but if they aren’t resolved in time, a business can still be affected by them before long. The Equifax breach is a perfect example of this, as it was a vulnerability that had been discovered, reported, and patched earlier that year, yet Equifax failed to apply the patch on time.

All businesses need to consider zero-day threats a major problem, and if you don’t take proactive action against them now, you could be putting your business at risk. To learn more about how you can protect your business now, reach out to us at (415) 295-4898.