Cybersecurity Awareness Month – Social Media Risks

Spear Phishing Keys off of Social Media Information

Eighty-four (84%) percent of business owners have received sophisticated and dangerous spear-phishing attacks in the last year alone. Business owners and their staff need to be perfect at identifying these targeted attacks. Hackers only need to succeed once.

Training business owners not to share their lives on Social Media is a great first step.  Present these concepts in a personable and family-oriented way.  “Dear Business Owner: you would not want your daughter to publish her personal information on the web, so don’t do it yourself and place your business and maybe your family at risk.”

The less information floating around the Internet on all of us, the better.  However, spear-phishing attacks are just one method hackers use to attack us.  There are many others and the protections needed to thwart them are listed below.  Get started today in building your defense-in-depth cybersecurity program with CyberHoot. MSPs sign up here.

CyberHoot Best practices:

1. Train your employees on the common attacks that are out there.  From weak passwords and password managers, to the importance of multi-factor authentication and how to spot phishing attacks.  Awareness is the key to defending your business.
2. Govern you employees with cybersecurity policies including Acceptable Use, Password, Information Handling and a Written Information Security Policy.
3. Establish cybersecurity best practice processes such as a Vulnerability Alert Management Process (VAMP) and a Cybersecurity Incident Management Process (CIMP) to guide and require action in the face of an emergency.  Then move on onboarding and offboarding processes, SaaS management processes, and 3rd party risk management.
4. Establish strong technical protections including: a Firewall, antivirus, anti-malware, anti-spam, multi-factor authentication on all critical accounts,  Enable full disk encryption, manage the keys carefully, and most importantly, adopt, train on and require all employees to use a Password Manager.
5. Test employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks.  CyberHoot has released a disruptive method of Phish Testing the fills in gaps in your employees knowledge without punishing them for failure.  Instead we reward them for success.  More info is available here.
6. Backup your data by following our 3-2-1 Backup methodology to ensure you can recover your business from a cybersecurity event.
7. In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections) or prohibiting their use entirely.
8. If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.
9. Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.

CyberHoot believes that for many small to medium sized businesses and MSPs, you can greatly improve your defenses and chances of not becoming another victim of cyberattack if you follow the advice above.

We hope you’re enjoying Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CAM).  Visit or subscribe to CyberHoot’s Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter pages to get daily updates throughout the month.

Additional Reading:

Protecting yourself from Social Media Risks: University of Missouri System

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