The Most Common Cybersecurity Mistakes Businesses Tend To Make

Originally Published: February 3, 2026

The realm of cybersecurity is vast, and the potential for mistakes is both widespread and highly costly. You want to make sure that you’re doing what you can to protect your business data, but investing in the right security systems alone isn’t enough. You need to understand where companies tend to go wrong, and when it tends to bite them in the behind. Here, we’re going to look at some of the most common mistakes businesses make when it comes to their cybersecurity, and the measures you can put into place to ensure it doesn’t happen to you.

Poor Or inconsistent Training

If you underestimate the role that employee training plays in cybersecurity, then you’re going to fall victim to one of the most common causes of breaches: human error. A lot of threats start with an employee falling for a social engineering scam or simply leaving their workstations or data vulnerable. Ongoing cybersecurity training for your team helps them better recognize threats like phishing attempts, unsafe links, or strange behavior from third parties. Training not only helps them be aware of the different types of threats out there, but builds within them a vigilance that makes them more likely to recognize them on their own, or at least be skeptical enough to flag them.

Poor Password Hygiene

In some cases, hackers don’t need to do any manner of social engineering; they’ll be able to work out passwords without issue. This often happens if users have particularly weak passwords, or passwords that have been used with other accounts and then discovered via a breach. With the help of the right password manager tools, you can make sure that your employees aren’t reusing credentials. They can also help them generate strong passwords for any accounts you set up. Make sure that your team understands the importance of not using the same credentials for tools accessed inside work as they do for personal logins. Multi-factor authentication can go further in making sure that a password alone isn’t enough to allow for a breach, but starting with good password hygiene is always a good idea.

Neglecting Your Updates

It’s very easy for us and our team to be in the middle of important work, to be interrupted by an update notification for our software or operating system, and to ignore or postpone it. Delaying a software update for a couple of hours or days might not be the most risky behavior in the world, but when it becomes a pattern, or we fail to go back and install those updates, it becomes a dangerous mistake. Security updates fix exploits, but they also effectively publicize them, so that hackers and attackers will look for those vulnerabilities in the hopes of finding users who haven’t yet updated them. Ensure that your business has a structured patch management process to know when and which systems are outdated, and that you take a routine approach to keeping everything current.

Not Backing Up Data Properly

Cloud storage tools have made it so easy to backup your data that you might assume it’s more secure than it really is. You don’t want to recover from a data breach or loss incident only to find out that your backup is outdated, incompatible, or otherwise unusable. Make backup a routine, an active process you participate in, not something you expect to keep running without issues in the background. While you should use automatic backups, also test them routinely for recovery purposes to make sure that you’re able to rely on them when you need them most.

Allowing Uncontrolled Remote Work

While remote and hybrid work are becoming much more common nowadays, a lot of businesses do not put the necessary precautions in place to ensure that flexible policies don’t compromise their security. If you allow employees to access company systems from poorly secured devices, it can introduce whole new levels of vulnerabilities. Ensure that your policies are clear and that any devices used must meet standards such as having end-to-end encryption, endpoint protection, and fully updated software and operating systems. For remote work, you might even want to supply hardware that you can make sure fits your standards for your employees, rather than relying on them to manage their own security with the right care.

The tips above do not comprise a complete business cybersecurity strategy, but they do ensure that you’re not making some of the most costly mistakes out there as you continue to invest in the protections and policies you need to keep threats at bay.

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