Cybercrime has exploded in the last few of years with major ransomware attacks putting enterprises' data at risk. 

One of the most prolific emerging threats regarding data loss is the human error factor. It's estimated that 70% of all cyber security incidents today are the result of internal security issues that no firewall or anti-virus could have prevented. 

It’s important to understand the most common cyber security mistakes your employees are probably making and know how to mitigate them.

Included to the right are just some of the common cyber security mistakes your employees could make that would likely result in your company being hacked.

Stolen login credentials are the most common way hackers breach corporate systems, and most of the time, these credentials are stolen through a phishing scheme. A highly targeted variant of phishing, called spear phishing or business email compromise, is used to convince employees to wire money or send sensitive data to cyber criminals.

Here are just a few of the mistakes that your employees are probably making right now:

Use of weak passwords and reusing old passwords.
Giving login details to a co-worker.
Writing login details down and leaving them laying around.
Leaving their computer unattended and not logging out first.

Laptops and devices that have no physical or password protection are vilnerable. Employees who travel are the biggest risk here, who at times may leave these devices unattended, perhaps at seminar or in the hotel room. These are prime targets for hackers, if there is no protection on the device, they are in and accessing your data. 

More and more, employees are using unauthorised hardware and or software. 

Generally, these employees have good intentions but don’t realize how dangerous it can be to security and compliance. USB drives are cheap now, do you know if your employees are plugging them into their work computer. Do you know what they might be copying to those drives?

Also, one of the most successful tactics hackers use is to leave a USB thumb drive where employees will find them. Then human curiosity comes into play with the let’s see what’s on it. They plug it into their work computer and BAM, the whole network is infected.

Public WIFi is everywhere and unfortunately, most of the public think they are secure. Wrong, hackers can access these networks also, browse for devices on the network, such as your laptop and potentially copy data off it. The other BIG mistake people make is to log into sites, be it work, social media, online mail etc. 

This is self explanatory, vigilance is the key here, if in doubt, delete them.