How much damage could a colleague do accidentally or deliberately?

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Created: Tuesday, 27 October 2020

Written by Ella Coles

A criminal offered a Tesla employee a million dollars to run a program on his work computer. Luckily for Tesla, they reported it and Tesla worked with the authorities to catch the baddies. If the employee had run that program, Tesla likely would have been held to ransom, had their intellectual property stolen etc.

This is a high profile case against a huge organisation, but it is a sign of things to come and will trickle down to small and medium businesses.

Businesses need to protect their IT from employees in other, more ordinary circumstances, eg:

• Deleting everything in their email mailbox before they leave because they honestly believe it’s right thing to do
• Deleting information if they are sacked or about to be
• Stealing information from the business before they leave a company
• Access systems after they have left the company

Small businesses are especially vulnerable as many give all employees access to almost everything. One of the best steps any business can take is to adopt a “Principle of Least Privilege”. Each employee has the minimum access to perform their job and nothing more. A good place to start is:

• Remove admin rights on devices
• Remove admin rights on cloud/web services
• Limit access within line of business applications
• Structure files/folders and limit access

At telanova, we are experts at making sure employees can access what they need to do their job, while limiting access to everything else. Engage telanova as your IT team and we will secure your systems.