3 Rules for Cyber Monday

It’s nearly here again folks, and the clues are all there: planning the office Christmas party, your boss humming Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and an armada of Amazon packages arriving.

Which brings me nicely to the topic of this blog: online shopping at work.

It’s official; we are ‘in love’ with online shopping. At this time of the year, it’s harder to resist temptation. Retailers conjure up special shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday - all aimed at getting us to part with our hard earned cash. While online retailers rub their hands in anticipation of December 1st, for companies without proper web security, the online shopping season could turn out to be the nightmare before Christmas.

In a recent survey by RetailMeNot, a digital coupon provider, 86 percent of working consumers admitted that they planned to spend at least some time shopping or browsing online for gifts during working hours on Cyber Monday. That equates to a whole lot of lost productivity and unnecessary pressure on your bandwidth.

To help prevent distraction and clogged bandwidth, I know of one customer, I’m sure there are others, who is allowing his employees time to shop from their desks in their lunch breaks. He’s a smart man - productivity stays high and employees happy.

But productivity isn’t the only concern for the IT department – cyber criminals are out in force at this time of year, trying to take advantage of big hearts and open wallets with spam and phishing emails. One click on a seemingly innocent link could take your entire network down.

To keep such bad tidings at bay, here’s a web security checklist to ensure your holiday season is filled with cheer not fear.

1.  Flexible Filtering. Set time quotas to allow online shopping access at lunchtimes, or outside of core hours. Whatever you decide is reasonable, make sure your employees are kept in the loop about what you classify as acceptable usage and communicate this through an Acceptable Usage Policy.

2.  Invest in Anti-malware and Anti-spam Controls. As inboxes start to fill with special offer emails, it gets more difficult to differentiate between legitimate emails and spam. These controls will go some way towards separating the wheat from the chaff.

3.  Issue Safety Advice to Your Employees. Ask employees to check the legitimacy of a site before purchasing anything. The locked padlock symbol indicates that the purchase is encrypted and secure. In addition, brief them to be alert for phishing scams and not to open emails, or click on links from unknown contacts.