There’s one key piece of advice we all keep giving users and it simply isn’t working. It’s time IT teams took matters into their own hands rather than leaving it to staff.
How many times have you seen, or given, the advice to ‘avoid clicking suspicious links?’
How many times have you sat back and wondered what a suspicious link looks like or how it differs from an unsuspicious link?
It seems the National Cyber Security Centre is with us on this one.
A recent post on ‘Telling users to avoid clicking bad links still isn’t working’ hits the nail on the head.
What’s a bad or suspicious link?
Most of us know to avoid clicking links in random emails, but what about infected links on the web? How can you tell whether a link is suspicious or not when it’s on a page?
When many employees need to use the web for work, there is an inevitable amount of link clicking that needs to happen.
The average user isn’t going to know whether that link is safe or not.
We tell staff to only use authority websites or trusted domains when researching or working.
But what’s to say that domain hasn’t been hacked or compromised in some way.
How can you mitigate against bad links?
There is no replacement for education and we should definitely keep training and reminding staff to be mindful when clicking links.
We should also use every tool we have to assist staff keep themselves and their employer safe.
Tools such as:
Using a secure web host
Using a secure web host can go a long way to minimising risks from hacked websites.
Host your website with a secure host and you can prevent the vast majority of attacks, from DDoS to hacking attempts.
If you can keep your business website secure, you can prevent your own links being hacked, redirected or poisoned.
That protects your staff, your visitors and your reputation!
Use Cloud Heroes Mail Filtering
Our mail filtering system protects you against spam and unsolicited emails as well as having a URL filter.
When a user clicks on any link, the link itself is interrogated to see whether it’s safe or not.
This system can really help mitigate against the sort of attacks and is available from just £1 per mailbox per month, saving organisations a potential fortune!
Use Office 365
No email system is totally secure, but there are platforms that take security more seriously than others. Office 365 is one of those platforms.
Microsoft has come along in leaps and bounds over the past decade. As a company, they now put security at the top of the agenda and security is many times more effective than it used to be.
Microsoft 365 and Outlook in particular has done a lot of work to prevent spam and block infected links within emails.
Education is still key as many emails still get through, but it’s an effective way to prevent the majority of threats from hitting inboxes.
Using Office 365 also means copies of documents are kept in the cloud and can form part of a backup strategy.
Should the worst happen with an infected link, you should have copies of everything ready to go.
Hosted desktop
Hosted desktop is another innovation that can help businesses stay secure. Rather than installing Windows on every desktop, staff can log into a virtual desktop in the cloud.
Those desktops benefits from all the latest security measures to help keep staff and data safe.
They can also be securely deleted and instantly replaced should someone click a bad link or become infected with any kind of threat.
Using technology to mitigate threats
Those are just 3 of the many ways you can mitigate against common threats using technology.
Each provides significant benefits as well as security without slowing you down or getting in the way.
Protect visitors from clicking infected links using a secure web host while protecting your reputation.
Protect your own staff and data by using Office 365 and hosted desktop. All the benefits of the cloud with none of the downsides of being connected.
In fact, hosted desktop offers all the advantages of computing with fewer downsides and a much lower cost.
No wonder it’s becoming so popular!