Digital Risk: How to Protect Against New Threats

Cyber security weighs heavy on the minds of IT leaders in every industry, and the pandemic has only made the worry about digital risk more pressing. With so many companies now using a hybrid model of work-from-home and in-office teams, there are more targets for cyber criminals, resulting in a new focus on locating weak points and implementing better security policies and tools.

A common misconception is that cyber criminals only target the biggest companies. However, hackers may consider smaller companies to be low-hanging fruit or see a small company network as an access point to larger vendors or other business partners.

The good news is that you don’t have to spend millions of dollars on infrastructure to protect your data. Working with a third-party security provider may help you reduce your digital risk by determining the highest-priority vulnerabilities and addressing them with a strategic approach.

Employee-Targeted Digital Risk

An emerging area of concern is the targeting of personal devices to gain access to corporate assets. Among companies that utilize a bring your own device (BYOD) program, personal devices can represent a major area of vulnerability. Some refer to this attack surface as the employee-targeted digital risk.

Hackers focus on personal devices that are brought into work through a BYOD program and will even get into personal accounts. Once they get into these devices, they can move laterally into the company’s system. What’s being done to prevent this from happening is the implementation of personalized cyber security management (PCM). This helps to protect the employee device when they’re offsite.

Audit Exposure Levels

You have the means to protect your business-related devices and accounts fully, but personal devices and accounts can introduce more risk because your security teams don’t have as much authority to control them, so the security strategy should focus on the things your team can control.

One area of opportunity for minimizing cyber security risk related to employees’ personal devices is regular training. Helping employees understand the dangers of public, unsecured WiFi and how to recognize phishing emails can reduce the likelihood of infiltration through a personal device.

You can also schedule regular audits to determine where there are vulnerabilities. The security strategy moving forward can focus on these entry points and finding solutions for closing them to attack.

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