How To Motivate And Train Network Abuse Staff

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How To Motivate And Train Network Abuse Staff

Network abuse staff have a highly specialized and stressful role, dealing with escalating levels of network abuse on a daily basis. On an average day, a service provider’s abuse team can deal with thousands of abuse reports. It’s important that abuse staff are well trained and constantly motivated to keep them performing at their best.

Network abuse is on the rise, with Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigation Report showing the global cost of cybercrime is set to reach $2 trillion by 2019. To ensure your network abuse staff are motivated and prepared to deal with this escalation, implement these good practices:

Help your team develop their career paths

Not everyone is suited to dealing with the many responsibilities of working at the abuse desk. It’s good practice to rotate your staff through all aspects to help them learn different aspects of the job. This enables them to discover where their strengths and weaknesses lie and have the added benefit of enabling them to gain a more holistic understanding of how an abuse desk is run.

Support your team and keep them positive

Clear, honest communication is an important aspect of keeping your team’s morale up. Encourage them to share their ideas and opinions, and involve them when making abuse-related decisions. Acknowledge your staff’s contributions and make it clear that you value their opinions. Network abuse work can be very exhausting, so for upper management to show support for their hard work and contribution.

Train them to respect privacy

One of the biggest issues abuse staff face is dealing with abuse while still protecting customer privacy. If a member of your network abuse team discloses sensitive information, your service provider might face legal and liability issues. To avoid this, train your employees to respect and adhere to all policies, particularly when they are dealing with high priority abuse. When a network abuse team receives these types of reports, they should handle them with care and coordinate with the appropriate legal department and law enforcement teams.

Support them psychologically

Abuse staff working at an Abuse Desk, especially in hosting environments, can be faced with stressful and psychologically difficult types of abuse like child exploitation,  child abuse, murder-for-hire, organ blackmarket, snuff movies, and other unpleasant topics. Make sure that your abuse staff is prepared for these topics and receive the psychological support needed to deal with them.

Don’t overload your network abuse team

It’s impossible for your team to achieve a goal if they are understaffed and don’t have the technology they need to perform at their best. To do their work efficiently, your network abuse staff needs to be able to handle the load. If you feel your abuse desk is not fully staffed, you can’t expect them to handle the overflow. Rather gather metrics and show how your understaffed abuse desk is directly leading to lost revenue. If you can prove that lost customers directly correlate to unresolved support calls and blocked mail, you have a strong argument with upper management. You can also show a correlation between spam complaints and blacklists that your service provider is appearing on.

See also: You Know You Work On An Abuse Team When

Technical and software solutions that improve efficiency are an alternative to increasing your abuse staff numbers. To help teams gain clarity and take faster action, AbuseHQ from Abusix integrates into existing infrastructures to provide the insight necessary to identify and shut down network abuse at its source. To find out more about how AbuseHQ can help abuse desks perform at their best, get in touch with a network abuse specialist.

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