Comedy flash genii Doghorse and Eclectech have outdone themselves with this ludicrously catchy tune about the perils of your office PC. It’s promoting Not Safe For Work? – workSMART’s new interactive training thingy on Internet security.
There’s a lot of advice out there on the Web for home users and for businesses setting up security systems, but very little in context for ordinary folks who want to keep themselves safe at work. Hopefully this will go a little way to redressing that, but it’s a big issue. If companies don’t invest enough in training their people to understand the nasties lurking out there on the Net, they’re as good as throwing away the benefit of the expensive security systems they’re buying, which are only as strong as their weakest link – In this case, the staff who are still busily opening dodgy attachments, choosing utterly crackable passwords, losing memory sticks, dissing their co-workers on public Facebook profiles, or writing personal emails from a company address.
This all has potential to come back on staff rather unpleasantly, when they quite often won’t have the slightest idea they were doing anything wrong. A security breach can lose the firm downtime, borked kit, stolen commercial data, and trash its reputation with customers. Companies who want the benefits of the Net have to realise they’re buying into its problems too, and that they’re going to have to take ownership of their own bit of the solution, putting their hands in their pockets to support their staff with proper training in keeping everything safe.
But whilst we’re waiting for this, get yourself aware of the issues (and when better to do this than the tail end of Get Safe Online Week?) and pop over to workSMART’s training toolkit for your own quick refresher.