The first quarter of 2023 landed with a thud as Amazon, Meta, Twitter, and other major U.S. companies announced layoffs caused by fears of recession, high inflation, and interest rate hikes. The current IT environment is fraught with heightened vulnerability and novel security threats, and when organizations quickly reduce staff, it can cause significant repercussions to a company’s cybersecurity posture.
Here are the top five security risks caused by layoffs.
1. Untrained employees
In a layoff, tasks disappear or are delegated to others. Training a new person could delay critical IT services. Or, that person may inadvertently jeopardize systems and data, resulting in security vulnerabilities. Untrained users can wreak havoc on your business by causing errors, creating bottlenecks, or even perpetrating fraud.
2. Insider threats
Organizations going through a layoff are incredibly susceptible to insider threats. Each year insider threats account for the loss of mission-critical data, downtime, lost productivity, and reputational damage. A report by Cybersecurity Insiders found that 66% of organizations feel moderately to extremely vulnerable to insider threats. Of the…
