To improve your marketing strategy, teams may often access a wide range of online platforms, including sketchy, grey-hat websites. Access to these sites may expose your marketing teams and their systems to potential malware, phishing attempts, or other security threats.

However, some of these resources, although risky, may be necessary to their success. That means you may have to protect them without hindering their productivity. Let’s explore a thoughtful approach that combines technical solutions with employee education, balancing efficiency and security within your organization.

Common Threats Marketing Teams Face from Sketchy Websites

Your marketing team often accesses plenty of online platforms for research, advertising, and social media management. For this reason, they may be inadvertently exposed to malicious content and threats that may negatively affect their ability to do their work. Here are some common threats they may face:

  • Phishing attacks from websites mimicking legitimate platforms. Your marketing team may be lured into sharing sensitive information, leading to identity theft and financial fraud. Your marketing team may be targeted for access to critical customer communication records.
  • Some sketchy websites may use drive-by downloads to install malware, such as spyware or ransomware, which can steal data or hold your marketing teams’ devices hostage.
  • Data breaches on your marketing team’s systems can lead to unprecedented downtime. That may lead to delays in campaigns, reducing efficiency, and impacting deadlines.
  • Their devices may be recruited into coordinated botnets that distribute spam and malware, exposing you to potential lateral movement attacks and other legal and security risks.
  • A security breach from your marketing team may damage the reputation of your business, injuring customer trust and damaging your business opportunities.

Protecting your Marketing Team

Marketing teams, especially ad buyers and creative professionals, play a critical role in the success of your business. Protecting them from online threats, including sketchy and risky websites, can help them succeed in their roles. It also reduces your cybersecurity risk profile, enabling you to increase your productivity.

To succeed at protecting them needs a mix of technical solutions, training, and operational best practices. Here’s a tailored list of tools and approaches to help you balance security and productivity:

Employee Training and Awareness

Security awareness training can help your marketing team deal with vulnerabilities that arise from human error. It also makes them security-conscious, taking action to secure their devices from potential intrusion when accessing potentially unsecure websites for research.

Teach your marketing team to recognize and respond to potential phishing attempts. One way to do this is to run regular phishing simulations targeted at marketers. Use fake client requests or urgent ad approvals to build skepticism among team members. Doing this teaches them to verify any request before responding to it.

Additionally, teach them good cybersecurity hygiene. That includes secure password practices, and incident reporting procedures. This way, they protect their personal devices from intrusion and your systems from potential data breaches. This proactive approach reduces the likelihood of breaches and improves incident response.

Implement Strong Authentication

You can use strong authentication techniques to secure your marketing team from potential phishing attacks and credential theft. This way, if an attacker compromises your marketer’s credentials, they get limited access to your systems and software.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) remains one of the most robust approaches to strong authentication. It combines two or more factors from different categories, creating a multi-layered defence most intruders cannot easily break through. You can implement MFA to use biometrics or hardware tokens besides a password to fortify logins against phishing attempts.

Additionally, MFA ensures you stay compliant with data protection, privacy laws and regulations. Using strong encryption not only protects you from potential intrusion, but it also protects you from exposure to legal risks and fines that may result from successful breaches.

Use Web-Filtering and Content-Blocking Tools

Since your marketing team is already exposed to risky domains and content, using web-filtering tools and content blockers can reduce their security risks. These tools use content and DNS blocklists with updated lists of potentially unsecure websites and content which may expose your teams to threats of phishing, ransomware and other malware.

Some blocking and web-filtering tools also feature browser extensions which add an extra layer of protection to your marketing employees on risky websites. These extensions are easy to configure, offer report visualization, and can be tailored to the team’s needs without requiring network-wide changes.

Better yet, you can implement network monitoring and DNS filtering tools which detect and block potentially harmful sites in real-time. These tools automatically restrict access to unofficial software download sites, file-sharing platforms, and social media, reducing your team’s exposure to risks while maintaining network performance.

Establish Clear Browsing Policies

Setting clear browsing policies helps reduce the risk of an employee inadvertently visiting sketchy sites. For instance, you can set policies that prevent your marketing teams from accessing high-risk categories like pirating, gambling, and streaming sites, which are notorious for malware and data breaches.

You can also set policies to permit access to necessary platforms like social media or advertising tools, but with guidelines on safe usage. One way is to require an administrator to give access to third-party apps or to use role-based access controls.

Once you’ve set these policies in place, ensure all your staff can access, regularly review and give feedback on them. You can also share these policies during training sessions to ensure compliance without disrupting workflow.