08 Oct Personnel Risk Assessment For Your Business

Understanding the Risk of Staff Members

Protecting your business in the digital age remains one of the most important tasks for any company. Threats now arrive in a variety of forms, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Part of handling said threats are establishing good cybersecurity policy, and an effective way to accomplish this is through risk assessment.

Risk assessment is an examination of staff to identify employees that may engage in riskier behavior and thereby introduce potential points of malware entry (or similar). Often this is because staff engages in risky behavior because they do not understand all the risks and therefore conduct activity that’s unsafe.

There’s general risk assessment (dealing with all aspects of your business) and then there’s personnel risk assessment, which we’ll focus on. Creating effective profiles will help you reach proper conclusions to enact the right policy.

Conducting a risk assessment of personnel has similar steps to a traditional assessment. Reaching conclusions on staff is based on a variety of factors:

• Does employee follow cybersecurity guidelines and policies 
• Does employee utilize devices that are encrypted and safe to connect to/from
• If staff does engage in risk behavior, how often does it occur
• Does behavior result in malware complications or otherwise

Sometimes, this can be as simple as not understanding the tell-tale signs of say, a phishing email, or directly neglecting cybersecurity policies (such as a business requiring all staff to use two-factor authentication on their devices/connections). In other cases, some staff use the dark web which often results in leaked business information for malicious intent. You can imagine a disastrous outcome for that.

There are various ways to confront these potential risks and build portfolios on staff who are either high or low risk. Utilizing ID Agent, for instance, is one such method. Services like these (also offered through Bytagig) are a convenient and safe way to generate profiles of staff based on their activity. In the case of ID Agent, it tracks info that may have been leaked outside the business, and whether that was rooted in user activity.

Other methods involve keeping an eye on individual behavior to again, establish profiles and understand the level of risk they create for a business. In this instance, it’s important to modify privileges as necessary. For instance, a staff member that frequently browses irrelevant business websites or social media is likely creating larger risk to the business, so limiting their internet privileges until their behavior adjusts is one such solution.

If you’d like to learn more, you can contact us at Bytagig.