As much as you have to protect your business from external threats and cyber attacks, it would be a mistake not to pay attention to internal threats too.

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To safeguard sensitive data and protect client privacy, you need a robust cybersecurity protocol that factors in both outside and inside threats. Employee fraud is a real risk, especially as would-be cybercriminals are emboldened by the autonomy afforded to them in a remote work environment.

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If you want to stabilize your business in the face of cyber threats from all angles, read on to find out how employee internet usage monitoring software can bolster your cybersecurity.

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Pinpoint Unusual Activity

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Before you can act to prevent employee fraud, you need a way of keeping your fingers on the pulse of unusual activity.

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The best way to avoid being stung by cyber threats, after all, is to bring them to light. 

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If you don’t have a way to monitor employees’ computers, it’s likely that you’ll only stumble upon instances of fraud after they’ve been committed. At that point, it’s too late to take any kind of meaningful action to prevent further fraudulent activity.

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It may feel like you need to spy on your employees computers at all times, but with an employee monitoring solution like Insightful running in the background, there’s no need to pay attention to every action. 

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The need for a tool like this is hard to overstate - especially in a virtual work environment, in which employees can be emboldened by anonymity at their workstations, making it easy for them to commit potentially fraudulent activity.

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How Insightful Can Help

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With work timer app Insightful, you can visualize what your employees are doing on a day-to-day basis both on a macro and a micro level. 

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Glance at the real-time employee productivity dashboard for insights into shift lengths, productivity trends, and attendance, then zoom in for a close-up view of which apps employees are using and how they spend their work hours.

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Once you establish a baseline for productivity, and what’s normal for your team and employees in terms of activity levels and app usage, you can more easily detect deviations that might indicate unusual activity.

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The activity and app usage tracking can provide insight into suspicious activity, which you can then bring up with the employee. If they are attempting to access files they don’t have permission to, for example, this could be seen as cause for concern.

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With notifications, you can set up your digital workspace as if it were rigged with tripwires - any attempt from an employee to access certain information triggers the tripwire and notifies you immediately.

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What’s more, you can set up custom interval screenshots to catch employees in the act. Screenshots provide you with evidence of suspicious activity, but beyond that, they can act as a deterrent preventing employees from attempting fraudulent activity.

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Access Company Computers

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More than just screen spying software, Insightful goes above and beyond to help you get to the root of any suspicious activity with remote desktop access.

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If your employees work from company-supplied computers, you have the power to remotely access individual computers and shut down any suspicious activity at the source. Even as just a precautionary measure, remote computer monitoring software can help you restrict the access a particular employee has to certain files or data if you notice any red flags. 

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Plus, if worst comes to worst and you have to terminate an employee’s contract with the company, you can immediately lock them out of the computer, preventing any further fraudulent activity attempts.

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How Insightful Can Help

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With software to track employees, such as Insightful, you can set up activity tracking on any and all company computers regardless where employees are working from.

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You can also use the ‘Managers’ and ‘Admins’ permissions to control what information employees have access to. Beyond permissions, Insightful offers the following cybersecurity measures:

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•  Secure HTTPS connection for your data
•  Advanced hashing algorithm for password protection
•  The option to enable two-factor authentication 

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Build a Case with Concrete Evidence

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If you’re dealing with an instance of employee fraud, and you want to crack down on it to prevent future occurrences, you’ll need to build a solid case against the perpetrator.

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This is another reason why employee monitoring platforms are essential in the prevention of employee fraud: they allow you to be constantly collecting data that can be used to file a case against employees who commit fraud.

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In this regard, activity monitoring software is multifunctional - you can use it to gather time data and build performance and productivity reports, but also to log important information about how employees are spending their work hours.

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How Insightful Can Help

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Insightful’s automatic time tracking runs in the background at all times on the computers it has been configured to work on. As such, you don’t have to be present or actively monitoring what your employees are doing at every hour of the day to catch them in suspicious activity.

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In fact, in most cases, employee fraud occurs outside of work hours so as not to raise any red flags, so without automatic time tracking, you’re unlikely to ever catch them in the act.

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The time logs created by Insightful can give you a minute-by-minute breakdown of which apps employees used and what websites they visited, and if you have screenshots enabled, you’ll also get some visuals to accompany the numbers.

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With time data reports, along with message logs and web usage, you can build a compelling case against employees committing fraud. Acting as spy software, Insightful can back up your case with concrete evidence of wrongdoing.

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Operate with Discretion

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One of the perceived downsides of user activity monitoring solutions is that they give the game away. Overtly tracking employees’ time after all could lead employees to seek alternative ways to commit fraud.

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Tracking time without employees knowing, then, is more likely to lead to you catching the culprits in the act.

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That’s why discretion is key, and it’s something you can find with Insightful.

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How Insightful Can Help

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Far more than a spy tool, Insightful presents the option of discreetly tracking time in ‘stealth mode.’

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What is stealth mode?

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It’s a way of tracking activities and time in the background without any input from users. As long as their computer is turned on, you’ll be able to collect time and productivity data.

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Employees won’t see the Insightful icon on their OS, nor will they be aware that the software is running on their computer. They also won’t have access to any of the data you’re collecting on them, so they’ll be completely oblivious of the fact that their activities are being monitored.

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This is hands-down the best way to catch would-be cybercriminals within your ranks in the act and prevent future fraudulent activity.

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