Employees, Not Tech, Are The Biggest Cyber Threat

Financial advice firms that step up cybersecurity through technological improvements may be ignoring the biggest source of data breaches: their own employees.  That’s because measures such as firewalls, encryption and multi-factor authentication don’t do anything by themselves to prevent hacker attacks against a company’s workers.

Fraudsters can breach a company’s cybersecurity through the use of social engineering. For example: by impersonating legitimate sources via email, phone calls and websites, hackers can trick workers into giving up confidential information or initiating a hack that could bring down a company’s operating system, he writes. Employees are particularly vulnerable on public wifi systems, and can put confidential data at risk if they share laptops or smartphones, according to Kapahi – and unauthorized access to data can lead to data theft.  MORE