Many people are returning to the office for the first time in years or moving to a hybrid work schedule. This shift brings new distractions and disruptions: employees must navigate a new working environment or constantly switch between locations while navigating both video and in-person meetings. Business leaders must consider the impact on employees’ wellbeing and, in turn, their cybersecurity behavior.
In a new report from email security company Tessian, nearly half of employees cited distraction and fatigue as the main reasons they made a cybersecurity mistake, up from 34% in 2020. These mistakes are not uncommon — a quarter of employees fell for a phishing email at work in the last year, while two-fifths sent an email to the wrong person — and can lead to costly data breaches, loss of a customer and possible regulatory fines. In fact, almost one-third of businesses lost customers after an email was sent to the wrong person. The stakes for employees are also high: one in four people who made a cybersecurity mistake at work lost their jobs.
In a hybrid work environment, cybercriminals are using advanced techniques to impersonate colleagues and manipulate our behavior. To outsmart them, businesses need to understand how stress, distraction and psychological factors are causing people to fall for these scams.
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