HR & Cyber Security, Basics You Should Know
As a department in your company, Human Resources has a lot of responsibilities, not to mention access to confidential information for your employees. This makes it all the more important to make sure that you are taking the right precautions to protect you and your employees’ information.
Here are just a few ideas on how to protect your company’s information in the HR Department.
Password Management
In a time when websites, emails, and passwords are easily accessible and hacked into, it is key to that you secure your company’s information with a password management system. There are several systems and companies that provide this service like LastPass or Bitwarden, but what it is is a system that stores your passwords, and requires you to only have one very secure, hard to guess main password to access them all.
Why do this instead of storing them on Google Chrome or Apple? It is simply less of a risk of them being breached, and if your physical device is stolen, you don’t have to worry about the entirety of your passwords being compromised since they do not live on your machine, and cannot be accessed without that main password.
Device Encryption and Firewall
Speaking of securing your information, it is vital that you ensure that your work computer is secured with a password. That may sound like basic knowledge, but it would surprise you how many people do not put a password on their computer or cell phone, making it a prime target if someone were to get ahold of your device, thus giving them all of the information to your employees and company.
Phishing Emails
Everyone in your company will be susceptible to phishing emails, but no one is in more danger to it than the HR Department. Let’s say that you have an “employee” who sends you an email requesting a change in their direct deposit to a different bank account, but you do not do your due diligence and check the sender’s email address, OR follow up with them via call or Zoom? You have the potential to reroute their paycheck into a scammer’s bank account.
Or you may click a link in an email that is asking you to verify your account information, which asks you to input your username and password. Turns out, that was a phishing email to get into one of your accounts, and now you are on your way to being hacked.This is why it is so important to regularly be engaged in employee security awareness training, and to know what to look out for in phishing emails across the organization.
These are just a few of the things that you should be on the lookout for to help keep your company’s HR department safe in the cyber security realm.