In order to avoid becoming the victim of a ransomware attack or having company information fall into the hands of competitors, experts say it's imperative employers put together a playbook for their employees. 

"One of the things we find with cybercrime, many of the instances that happen are due to what you call hygiene or security hygiene," said Chris Hurley Vice President of Intellisystems. 

Chris Hurley says it's important for companies especially small companies to establish employee computer use ground rules to prevent data breaches.

 "Organizations can have policies that say what's allowed on computers, what's not allowed, having employees sign off on the acceptable use policy annually at least to remind them of the rules of the road." 

According to data security company Varonis, over 50 percent of data breaches are caused by unintentional human error.

Hurley says this can stem from something as simple as reusing passwords."I've got an account say on LinkedIn. They have my user name and I've got a password there. And it if I reuse the password somewhere else, if there's a breach in LinkedIn then that password can be used to attack other services", says Hurley.

Besides forbidding the reuse of passwords, Hurley also recommends maintaining data security. He suggests companies should come up with minimum standards for the complexity of passwords.

And as for the idea that employees changing passwords on a regular basis – can help ward off hackers – Hurley says – that's old thinking.

"The guidance is really changing on that. It's no longer considered best practices to force people to change passwords every 90 days unless they have a compliance reason to do that, cause it causes more problems than it solves, people will write down the password or just put a one on the end of it. Instead, the policy would be to change your password if you have reason to believe that there's a breach.>

Copyright 2021 WFXG. All rights reserved.