Teach Young Employees About Basic Security Through Browser Extensions

In a perfect world, your company’s native security software would be enough to keep employees secure. Unfortunately, online threats are becoming much more sophisticated, and employees are also vulnerable in their off-hours and on their personal devices. To make the situation worse, workers from Gen Z and Generation Alpha are often underprepared for the risks they will encounter online.

A little basic training in browser security might be a good way to get them thinking about online safety. Below are some extensions that could help keep your employees secure.

Unshorten.link to Keep Them Off Shady Websites

More advanced networks have led to convoluted URLs that sometimes read like paragraphs or whole pages of characters. It’s now common for app platforms or websites to shorten these URLs to smaller strings of characters, but this has the added effect of concealing the destination. Malicious operators can use shortened URLs to conceal malware, phishing attempts, or even entire fake websites. Unshorten.link lets you see what you are clicking on and helps you to outright block websites that might target you. Websites that are blocked can become a less significant threat.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials to Avoid Trackers

For employees who might be discussing company business on personal devices or accessing company servers in a work-from-home system, trackers can be a threat. DuckDuckGo’s extension comes with a list of the most common trackers and blocks them automatically. It goes a step further by notifying its users when trackers have been blocked and what data those trackers were targeting, passively educating users on how these trackers operate.

Cookie AutoDelete to Clear Cookies Fast

This is one of the most straightforward extensions there is for deleting cookies that would otherwise clog up your browser. Every time your browser is closed, the extension gets rid of the whole mess. While some cookies can be helpful for online experiences, they can also give places for trackers and malware to hide, so do you really need to keep cookies around across multiple browsing sessions? In the cases where it’s really important (for example, your business networks), a website can be whitelisted, and its cookies will remain.

MalwareBytes Browser Guard for Cutting-Edge Security

One of the more advanced holistic browser safety extensions, MalwareBytes Browser Guard blocks requests from malicious websites and analyzes online activity for suspicious behavior. A feature this extension brings to the table is its security AI, which can identify never-before-seen trackers and other malicious behavior and block it in real-time. With increasingly advanced threats appearing on the internet with each passing year, AI security features like this may become increasingly important.

Expand on These Lessons

The hope is that as employees come to understand these extensions and why they are necessary, they will naturally become more aware of the security implications of their own actions and choices. With enough emphasis and natural discussion around these subjects, employees should begin to grow their knowledge and gain the ability to identify risks on their own. With companies working together to educate workers, it’s possible to create a safer online environment for everyone.