How to Protect Your Employees with Security Awareness Training

Cybercriminals today operate like a well-run business: they are intelligent, organized, use effective tools, and are motivated to get the job done. The only way to counter these terrorist-like groups is by deploying a robust cybersecurity posture that’s built using comprehensive security solutions. However, while you’re busy getting started, you may overlook the weakest link in your fight against cybercrime, malware, and ransomware — your employees.

With a work from anywhere approach becoming mainstream, businesses need to revisit their cybersecurity strategies to counter potential security incidents such as human errors, data breaches, and ransomware that enters your systems through phishing emails. All employees, irrespective of their role, can inadvertently expose your business vulnerabilities to cybercriminals.

Implementing routine security awareness training for employees can help you prevent a vulnerability from escalating into a disaster. As the first and last line of defense against cyberattacks, your employees must be thoroughly and regularly trained to identify and deflate potential cyberthreats.

Why Employees Pose a Risk to Businesses?

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020, 23 percent of data breaches in an organization occurred because of human error. An untrained employee can compromise your business’ security in multiple ways. Some of the most common errors committed by employees include:

1. Falling for phishing scams: With the onset of COVID-19, hackers masquerading as the World Health Organization (WHO) tricked people into clicking on malicious links and sharing sensitive information. Cybercriminals are using improved techniques, like spoofed emails and text messages, to propagate the ongoing scam. Your employees must be well-trained to counter it.
2. Bad password hygiene: A section of your employees might reuse the same password or a set of passwords for multiple accounts (business and personal), which is a dangerous habit that allows cybercriminals to crack your business’ network security.
3. Accidental Deletions: Employees are only human, so mistakes are going to happen. An accidental deletion of a critical file may go unnoticed for quite some time, and could end up causing major business delays.

The bottom line is with the sophisticated nature of cybercrime, security awareness training has become more important than ever before.

Security Awareness Training: An Essential Investment

While importance pieces of your overall security program, a few postures and a random security awareness email to your staff is not going to cut it. To deal with the growing threat landscape, your employees need thorough, easy to digest, engaging, and regular security awareness training content. Below are a few common ways to enhance your security awareness training program.

1. Use Security Awareness Training software – Use a tool that automatically delivers videos and training courses to your staff. Make sure that it has a good reporting mechanism, as you will want to know who completed the courses.
2. Get Help – Make sure you have a security expert assist you when rolling out a security awareness program. Their guidance could be critical in your defense against ransomware and data breaches.
3. Train Your Executive Team separately – Make sure that the leadership team is onboard with any security plan. They will set the pace for the rest of the organization.

Expecting your employees to train themselves on how to detect and respond to cyberthreats certainly isn’t the best way to deal with an ever-evolving threat landscape. You must take on the responsibility of providing regular training to your employees to ensure you adequately prepare them to identify and ward off potential cyberattacks.

The good news is that you can transform your business’ biggest Cybersecurity risk – your employees – into its prime defense.

Making all this happen will require continued effort and may seem like an uphill battle, but with the right partner by your side, you can easily integrate security awareness training into your business’ cybersecurity strategy. 

Article curated and used by permission.