Consider Your Employees’ Position

Think about how your team may react to the idea that they suddenly won’t have a stable source of income. Chances are, they will swiftly be open to the idea of alternative sources of income. Scam artists are very aware of this and will take full advantage of this opportunity.

The Better Business Bureau has collected data within a study that revealed a clear increase in cons and attacks toward businesses and workers currently out of work. Specifically, these attacks have taken the form of a kind of phishing known as employment scams.

Employment scams or job scams are just another way that cybercriminals gain access to your personal data. Basically, their hunting ground consists of the online job sites and gig opportunities that your employees may be tempted to peruse as their job prospects. By roping in your employees—potentially extracting their financial data as they do so—these scammers seek to profit for themselves. Scammers will post fraudulent job postings on job sites to rope in victims and require them to pay for training materials or special certifications that never come, or to cash a bad check before being “hired.”

Warning Signs to Watch Out For

To help protect your employees from these impacts, make sure that they look out for the following warning signs:

• Interviews are conducted over messaging services. If a company reaches out to you over a casual messaging service, like Facebook Messenger or Google Hangouts, it is highly unlikely that the offer is legitimate. This is only more the case if they request your personal information over these platforms. Most businesses will instead use their own messaging platform if they need to.
• Job descriptions and requirements are unclear. If an ad that you find is vague, it is almost certainly a trap. Businesses will be specific as possible to get the best candidates they can. Since scammers don’t have an actual job to fill, they aren’t nearly as particular in their job descriptions.
• Personal information is requested during or prior to an interview. A fake job ad will often ask for these kinds of details. Do not give them over. The time for that will come when the HR department is settling your paperwork once you’ve secured the job.
• Payment is required to apply, or they offer career counseling instead of a job. Desperation is a powerful motivation, so scammers have realized that they can leach money out of people who are job seeking or offer them career counseling services in exchange for a fee.

Make sure that you do everything you can for your employees as they are trying to make ends meet, and if they are looking for some extra freelance work, encourage them to keep a few best practices in mind: look up the company you’re interviewing online, keep your information to yourself, and take everything with a grain of salt.

Patriot Tech Services Inc. also can provide your business with the technology that allows your team to work remotely, sustaining your operations and keeping them employed. Learn more about how we can assist you by reaching out to us at 877-874-4629.

All Business Requirements and Responsibilities

It simply needs to be said: your employee handbook should be the consummate resource for any questions your employee has about their employment and the conditions of such. This ensures that each member of your team will at least have access to a resource that provides a lot of information that they will need, such as:

• FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) information
• Non-discrimination policies
• Sexual harassment policies
• Worker’s compensation policies

Furthermore, it should also provide them with a guide to your internal policies, like:

• Paid-time off policy
• Payment times and promotion/review policy
• Employee behavior expectations
• Employee dress code
• Benefit structure
• Remote work policy
• Social media and employee device policy

It also isn’t a bad idea to include some content to help set the tone of your organization for your employees. For instance, including your company’s mission and history into your handbook and endorsing the company culture you want to encourage is a good way to set the tone from the get-go.

Consider Your Layout

For your handbook to be optimally useful, you need to organize it so that it is as useful as you can make it. Arranging its contents to feature the most useful information at the very beginning can make them, well, more useful. Explaining all your policies in great detail and summarizing them in depth will help to do this, as well.

Update It

Here’s the thing: circumstances change over time, which means that you may eventually have to amend your policies to match. This is especially the case when the cause of these changes is based in the development of the technology that is available to businesses. As these changes are important to keep up to date with, your handbook will need to be adaptable… which, as you may have predicted, means it should be digital.

While it may seem silly to focus so much on what seems to be such a small detail, a good handbook can set the tone for your entire administrative and IT strategy. For assistance in creating the IT policies that will do your business the most good, give Patriot Tech Services Inc. a call at 877-874-4629.

Breaking Down the Numbers

According to the 2020 Black Hat Attendee Survey, these professionals were significantly concerned with potential cyberthreats and infrastructure beaches as the ongoing health crisis continues. Significantly concerned, as in 94 percent of respondents seeing COVID-19 increasing the threats to enterprise systems and their data, 24 percent seeing this threat as “critical” and “imminent.”

A lot of these respondents were concerned with the idea of vulnerabilities in their remote access systems, with 57 percent of them responding in the affirmative. 51 percent were concerned about possible social engineering and phishing attacks.

Adding to the concern, a full 90 percent of these cybersecurity professionals predict that there will be an attack on the critical infrastructure of the United States within the next two years, rising from the 2019 prediction stat of 77 percent and the 2018 stat of 69 percent. In 2019, 21 percent of these professionals thought that there were sufficient preparations in place for government and private industry to handle these attacks. Comparatively, only 16 percent feel the same this year.

Clearly, this does not bode well for businesses, and the current COVID-19 crisis only adds another level of difficulty to their operations. After all, many business owners may disregard one issue in the face of an admittedly much more visible one. Furthermore, with so many now operating remotely, there is the added insecurity that often comes with untrained remote operations.

For instance, many common security concerns are associated with the tools meant to secure precisely this kind of operativity, such as:

• Passwords were only rated as 25 percent effective
• Antivirus tools were rated as 31 percent effective
• Cloud security providers and cloud security tools received less-than-stellar ratings—41 and 46 percent saw them as ineffective.

What’s worse, 70 percent of these cybersecurity experts foresee a major security breach within their own organization within a year, with 59 percent citing insufficient security staffing and 56 percent citing insufficient budgetary resources to protect their operations.

Perhaps most discouraging is the idea that 53 percent of surveyed cybersecurity professionals stated that they felt serious burnout setting in. Considering that 2019’s stats placed this number at 40 percent, this jump is certainly severe.

What Can Be Done?

Based on the results of this survey, it’s clear that there needs to be a paradigm shift within businesses. Not only should cybersecurity be taken more seriously as these businesses go about distributing their available budgets, there also needs to be a greater awareness of the importance of cybersecurity on every level. Take, for instance, the importance of cybersecurity measures and how half of today’s available tools had such poor efficacy ratings. When passwords were only rated as effective by 25 percent, but multifactor authentication (84 percent), encryption (74 percent), and endpoint security (63 percent) saw much higher efficacy ratings, it seems pretty clear that the overall technology strategy that many businesses utilize needs to shift in the near future.

Patriot Tech Services Inc. can help in this regard, as our team can assist your business in implementing and utilizing these improved cybersecurity measures—even now. To learn more about how you can protect your business from cybercrime through strategic technology and improved user training, reach out to us at 877-874-4629.