5 ways your employees put your staffing business at risk

How many times have you received an email in your inbox with a link to something you have won, view a photo, download a video, etc. To make things harder, lots of times the sender pretends to be a well-known brand such as a major bank, major retail chain, an airline, etc. These emails are mainly trying to infect your system with a keylogger, or redirecting you to a spoofed website, to capture your login credentials, which are then used as a gateway to other parts of your work network or trick your business partners to initiate fraudulent payments to attacker’s bank accounts.

As cyber criminals have become more advanced and creative with carrying on these attacks, phishing has also become a lot harder to be detected by an untrained eye. Apart from educating your people, there are some other recommendations to keep these cyber threats at bay. One of them is Application Whitelisting, where you identify a list of trusted and approved applications that can run on your network. Once it is enabled, despite clicking a malicious link, something like a keylogger wouldn’t be able to run on the staff’s PC and can potentially save you a major security breach.

In this day and age, talking about the importance of backing up data may look redundant, because most staffing businesses do it anyways. The challenge most businesses face is that some users don’t clearly understand what locations are being backed up and end up saving valuable content on locations such as desktops or personal drives which are often not part of the backup regime. In case there was a security breach encrypting any of these non-backed up locations, it could mean a reasonable financial loss to the business due to data loss.

You can reduce the impact of a cyber intrusion by educating your staff on storage locations that get backed up, which will then help you recover quickly from an incident. Existing Office 365 subscribers have the option to back up their files in the Cloud using OneDrive for Business or use the more advanced means through Microsoft Azure.

Our staffing software, 1Staff Front Office is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, and therefore has a very easy to use backup system that automatically creates daily backups of production environments that are good for 4 weeks. There is also the option to do a manual backup at any time.

Disgruntled ex-employees can often do more harm to the business than what you would expect. Simply disabling their user accounts after letting them go, may not be sufficient these days. They may still try to access your company data through a friend and perhaps a sympathetic former colleague so it is important that you understand where your sensitive data resides and what attention is required to ensure it is a safe event from rogue insiders.

Access to 1Staff Front Office is controlled by the Microsoft Azure AD or ADFS identity provider, so removing the user from your identity pool removes their access to 1Staff Front Office as well.

Most employees are probably guilty of this and some even make it worse by keeping it the same password for a very long period of time. It is similar to building a strong castle with high walls, watch towers, retracting bridges, deep moats, strong bars across the windows, and having a cheap lock in the front which can easily be exploited by the bad guys to bypass every other security piece you have installed. Weak passwords like birthdays or consecutive numbers like 123456 are very easy to guess.

Educate your internal employees about the importance of keeping their passwords safe and using complex ones that are hard to guess. Implement policies that enforce having passwords that combine numbers, special characters and different letter cases. You can even include in your policy having to change passwords every 45 to 90 days and not allowing them to reuse previously used passwords. It may annoy some users, but will surely work for the business.

Office 365 supports multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as requiring a user to approve their login on their phone. That way it doesn’t matter how weak their password is or if it expires or not. The only way anyone can log in using that user’s credentials is if they approve it through MFA.

It is not uncommon for staffing firms’ to enable BYOD programs to keep up with the increasing demand for flexible working. Whilst these programs offer greater flexibility to the new generation of workers, they do add another level of complexity for IT to secure corporate data. BYOD is a great business model, which comes with its fair share of business risks such as data leakage, limited control over device security which could mean serious security holes that can be exploited by hackers. A commonly known threat to personal devices is malware that is installed inadvertently by the user, which can potentially find its way to the corporate network.

Since 1Staff Front Office is built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, all of its components are accessed using a browser, which means no software installs and no device dependencies. Microsoft has heavily invested in technologies that help you find the right balance between productivity and security. Office 365 subscribers can utilize BitLocker to encrypt Windows devices or turn on Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Information Rights Management (IRM) for better protection of your sensitive data.

For more advanced threat protection, there’s Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), a device-management and virtual-identity management suite that provides you all the tools you need to administer, provision and secure the devices that you use in your organization.