Even with all cybersecurity measures that you’ve established for your business, one careless staff can compromise it all. According to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA, business owners must be wary of potential attacks initiated from the inside, whether unknowingly or deliberately. If risky behaviours are repeatedly observed from any staff, it must be addressed immediately. Risky behaviours from your staff are a weak point, a vulnerability in your IT security Melbourne that hackers can exploit if not dealt with sooner.
Some risky behaviours can be minor in nature, yet they leave a hole in your IT security that can expose your entire system to cyberattacks. Security risks, regardless of severity or criticality, must be addressed with the utmost attention and preventive action. Risky behaviours range from ‘minor’ offences such as inserting random USB flash drives into your computer, to ‘serious’ offences such installing unlicensed software programs. Other risks to your IT security Melbourne that commonly happen include vulnerable passwords, single-factor authorisations, unsupported software, or remotely accessing your corporate account from a public computer. These risks must be avoided at all cost, and businesses should enforce policies in place to prevent staff from committing them.
CISA issued a warning to all business owners that risky and dangerous behaviours from their staff – and even business owners themselves – can put the business’ critical infrastructure at a higher risk. To help the businesses combat these internal issues, CISA have published a catalogue of ‘exceptionally risky’ behaviours to detect the problem before they cause any incident.
With the necessity for multifactor authentication nowadays, the single-factor authentication has become a risk in keeping your accounts safe and secure. A warning issued by CISA stating that the use of single-factor authentication “is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security”. This is especially true when remotely or administratively accessing system accounts that are connected to the critical infrastructure of the business.
Single-factor authentication must be phased out, and all businesses should upgrade their IT security Melbourne with at least two-factors authentication. Studies have shown that with multifactor authentication in place, it discourages the majority of cyberattack attempts. Multifactor authentication should be considered on critical infrastructures in order to prevent hackers from breaching the IT systems and disrupting the business.
Also considered by CISA to be a risky behaviour that has been commonly done by many is the use of default or repeated passwords. CISA even calls this practice dangerous! And we agree. With passwords that are too simple, predictable, or repeated, you are giving the hackers only little challenge to figure it out by simply guessing.
If your password has been previously compromised, CISA advises never to use that same password again, or even an extended variation of it (like many of us do). Otherwise, you are giving the hackers almost a free pass to access your account and to the network you’re connected to.
And if a computer connected to a critical infrastructure is using a software or operating system that is unsupported or obsolete, that too is considered a bad practice by CISA. Unsupported or obsolete software are those that no longer receive updates and security patches, leaving them vulnerable to the latest cyberattacks schemes and technologies.
The above risky behaviours must be detected and corrected as they are considered dangerous. These bad practices, as explained by CISA, “increases risk to our critical infrastructure on which we rely for national security, economic stability, and life, health, and safety of the public.”
The intention behind CISA’s efforts to compile a catalogue of risky behaviours is to help businesses and organisations involved in running or supporting critical infrastructure. But that same catalogue is actually useful for any kind of business that is digitised and connected to the internet. This kind of publication surely helps businesses protect themselves from the most potent kinds of cyberattacks.
To summarise, this article only lists 3 most common risky behaviours that any business with IT security Melbourne should rectify: use of single-factor authentication, default passwords, and unsupported software. These bad practices are dangerous and must be addressed with a sense of urgency before a cyberattack happens.