Reducing Cyber Crime In Your Inbound Call Center: 5 Best Practices

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cyber crime

Cybercrime is on the rise.

Is the data in your inbound call center secure?

It better be.

And if hackers breech your system, it can cost your company a pretty penny.

Consider these findings from the Ponemon Institute:

  • $7.6 million per year is the mean annualized cost of cyber crimes for organizations
  • $1,607 is the per capita cost of security breeches for SMBs
  • 60% of companies were notified by an external entity about a breech
  • 229 is the mean number of days hackers were on systems in 2013 before the discovery
  • 44% of observed phishing emails were IT-related, often attempting to impersonate the company’s IT department.

This is bad news for today’s companies. The security threat to all companies is real and constant. And inbound call centers are prime targets.

So if you manage a call center, your data better be secure.

5 Best Practices to Reduce Cyber Crime in Call Centers

One way to boost security is to follow industry best practices like the five below. They’re proven, practical, and productive.

1. Audit your environment regularly for reducing Cyber Crime

Audits are simple to do, but many managers don’t do them regularly. They’re just too pressed for time. If time is an issue for you, automate the auditing process using a remote monitoring and management (RMM) toolset. It can do the heavy lifting for you.

Also, consider password auditing. It allows you to track workers using weak or outdated passwords. A good password change process combined with a strong password management system protects passwords.

2. Strengthen your authentication process

Validating users’ identities is critical. But passwords alone don’t always work. So you need to add a second authentication method to the mix. Doing so is called multi-factor authentication. And it’s a proven best practice.

Multi-factor authentication backs up your password with either knowledge-based, possession-based, or inherence-based requirements, such as having a physical key or a smartphone. When properly implemented, multi-factor authentication is among the most potent countermeasures available.

3. Boost weak security through automation

A proven approach to automating security is to make account credentials more dynamic and more difficult to access. The key with automation is that users don’t know their own passwords until the last minute. This eliminates the risk of them knowingly or unknowingly giving them away.

A potent way to automate security is to use a password management system that supports password change automation. Look for a system that also supports Privileged Identity Management (PIM). PIM is great for meeting compliance issues and stopping internal breeches.

4. Secure your endpoints

Advanced endpoint detection solutions strengthen a network’s most vulnerable areas: Its endpoints. Endpoints are vulnerable internally because holes are intentionally created in the network security perimeter to allow internal and external users to access resources.

Advanced endpoint detection solutions dramatically improve a system’s ability to defend itself. But with so many endpoints in a corporate environment, manually managing a system is a never-ending job. Using an RMM system to automate the effort makes things more manageable.

5. Education, Education, Education

The weak links in every security system are workers. If they’re lax in safeguarding passwords and resources, your system is vulnerable—no matter how good the system is. User education is among the most potent ways to crush cybercrime.

That’s why it’s critical you support your technical measures with education sessions. But keep one thing in mind when you do this: How you present this information is nearly as important as the information itself.

Education does no good if your workers forget what you told them. So make your presentations clear, memorable, and inspirational. Do the topic justice.

Educating workers helps them stay vigilant. So it’s critical they buy into your security efforts and take your security measures seriously.

Cybercrime is on the rise. And since no system is fail-safe, you must take threats seriously. With enough money and motive, hackers can breech any security system.

A breach can cost your company big time and hand it a public relations nightmare that could bring it down. No one wants that.

As an outsourced IT help desk provider, we leverage our proven experience in offering tech support for small and medium-sized companies to serve your needs. Request a quote from our sales team and let us put our expertise to work for you.



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