Essential Phishing Prevention Tips: 10 Strategies Every Employee Should Know

Phishing is the greatest threat organizations face; hackers mimic legitimate organization emails, messages, or links to trick employees. In addition to fraud, your company needs to ensure it prevents piracy of your information and systems, and therefore, your employees must learn how to prevent phishing. Below, are the 10 best practices that should be adhered to strictly by any employee to avoid falling prey to this online vice.

1. Use Office 365 Email Filtering for Added Protection

A strong email filtering system can help prevent phishing emails from reaching your inbox. Office 365 email filtering is a valuable tool that automatically detects and filters out suspicious emails based on certain criteria, such as unusual sender addresses, misleading links, and potentially dangerous attachments. By setting up and regularly updating email filtering settings, you can significantly reduce the risk of phishing attacks.

2. Be Cautious with Unfamiliar Emails

Phishing Scams can be prevented by avoiding what one does not understand; this relates to emails. When you receive an email from a person you do not know, should take some time and study the content of the email before you open any links or download any attachments. Verify the sender’s email address, there are spelling mistakes, and the emails even generate a sense of a timely response.

3. Avoid Clicking on Suspicious Links

Most phishing emails contain links to websites that are designed to capture your information. Do not open any links in any email unless you are convinced that the email is from a genuine source. To be safe, rather than clicking the link (you are directed to a different page and asked to enter your contact information) roll over the link so you can see the actual website it goes to, and simply copy and paste the URL into your browser rather than clicking links.

4. Report Suspicious Emails

Asset: Remind employees to forward any e-mail that looks suspicious in any way to the IT department. Most organizations employ a group of IT support or IT security who can assess the credibility of the email, or provide the necessary action to take should the email be a phishing one. It will also help prevent other employees from being ripped off from the same emails that the employee reported.

5. Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an approach in which an account user offers several pieces of evidence for verification. MFA makes it more difficult for attackers to gain access because MFA involves one more step in addition to the password, such as a one-time code that will be sent to a mobile device, yet again if the attacker has got hold of a particular employee’s password, they cannot proceed.

6. Educate Employees About Phishing Tactics

Phishing training is mandatory to ensure the employees are in touch with current trends used in conducting phishing attacks. Because new techniques are always being developed, it is always useful to remind employees about what is currently floating around out there. Everyone should know how to recognize a phishing e-mail, what to do if one is received, and what general pitfalls to avoid.

7. Be Careful with Public Wi-Fi Networks

Open WLAN is another area where criminals install themselves to steal data and conduct phishing. Employees should refrain from viewing their mail and clicking on links including emails while connected to the internet from the public domain. However, the use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) should be used to enhance the security of the connection.

8. Don’t Share Personal Information via Email

Real business organizations will not request your account details such as passwords and account numbers or even credit card details through e-mail. This sort of information should never be provided in response to emails asking for it, and employees should ascertain the correctness of the sender first.

9. Verify the Sender’s Identity Before Responding

It requires that you always check the identity of the sender before replying to an email especially if it deals with sensitive or monetary email. Usually, do not reply to the email but try to contact the sender using his/her official number or visiting the official site of the company he/she represents.

10. Regularly Update Passwords

One of the ways that many people use to minimize the risk of having their accounts compromised is to change passwords frequently.” Explain to the employees to develop their password as an effective password and regularly change the password one is using especially while handling important information.

Conclusion

Every organization must prevent cases of phishing to guard their particularly valuable information and networks. So, to sum up the ideas given here and using Office 365 email filters, ten tips have been described to minimize the threat of a phishing attack. It is safe to conclude that adherence to planned training user security sessions, careful behavioral patterns, and precaution measures will help the company avoid future phishing threats.

Observer Voice is the one stop site for National, International news, Editor’s Choice, Art/culture contents, Quotes and much more. We also cover historical contents. Historical contents includes World History, Indian History, and what happened today. The website also covers Entertainment across the India and World.

Follow Us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, & LinkedIn