Leveraging social media enables your company to cost-effectively raise awareness about your brand, quickly engage with your customers, and easily announce your new products, services, and promotional offers. However, when used improperly, social media can jeopardize your business's cybersecurity.
In this blog post, we'll discuss five habits to avoid when using social media and what you can do to keep your company safe.
1. Sharing too much personal information
Any personal information, like birthdates and phone numbers, that your employees post on social media may be used by cybercriminals to compromise your employees’ accounts or even commit identity theft. If one of those employee accounts is used to manage your company's social media pages, then cybercriminals can also exploit or completely take over those pages.
2. Posting photos or videos of company assets
Your employees may think it's harmless to take a photo or video of your offices or the laptop, cellphone, or other gadgets they're using for work. However, if your staff are not careful, these photos or videos may give cybercriminals the information needed to hack into company accounts or steal business data.
For example, a photo of your offices may include notes from the last brainstorming session. Cybercriminals could then sell this information to your competitors. If your employee posts a photo of their ID badge, a hacker could copy the ID’s security bar code and gain access to various systems.
3. Venting on social media
When your employees have a bad day at work, they may feel the need to share their frustrations on social media. Overwhelmed by emotions, they may unwittingly disclose sensitive company information, which may be used to breach their accounts or even your company's network.
Related reading: Why cybersecurity awareness training is crucial
4. Storing or sharing company information via private or direct messages
Because only the sender and recipient can access direct messages (DMs) and private messages (PMs) on messaging platforms, your employees may believe these messages are secure. However, if cybercriminals gain access to an employee's social media account, they can easily view all the DMs and PMs sent and received by that account.
5. Using weak passwords or reusing passwords
Like many online users, your employees may be using weak passwords, such as "123456" or "password," for their social media accounts. Some may also be using the same password across multiple accounts. These poor password practices put your company at risk of a data breach.
How can you address the risk of poor social media habits?
You should conduct security awareness training for your employees. This can enlighten them on how their social media behavior can endanger their own and the company’s online security. Make sure the training instills good online habits, such as being careful of what employees share online, creating strong passwords, and enabling multifactor authentication. The training should also teach employees how to spot and respond to different types of cyberthreats.
Moreover, implement company policies on social media usage, such as:
- Only certain employees can access the company’s social media pages.
- Those employees can use only company-approved devices to manage the business’s social media pages.
- Those employees must use the company’s password manager to generate strong passwords for their social media accounts and to safely store these in an enterprise password management system.
- No employee can store or share confidential business information via DMs or PMs.
- Employees must not post photos or videos of business assets online without the company’s permission. If given permission, they must blur out any sensitive data, such as serial numbers, IP addresses, or confidential business information.
- Employees who endanger the company’s cybersecurity due to their poor online behavior must be educated on why there is an importance to keep intellectual or private information secure. If its repeated, they should be reprimanded.
Ler the cybersecurity experts of Quicktech help you boost your company’s cyber defenses. Book a FREE consultation with us today.