Which Would You Rather Have: Human Error or Human Firewall?

For all the effort and investment a modern business needs to put into its cybersecurity, it is equally important to acknowledge each team member's role in an organization’s security protections. Many of your employees, through no inherent fault of their own, are themselves a vulnerability as they allow many cyberthreats into your infrastructure through scams and simple mistakes. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Let’s go over why it is critical that you train your team to be a cybersecurity asset and how to do so.

Why are Your Employees Inherently a Business Vulnerability?

Let’s make one thing clear: modern cybersecurity protections are generally very good. It takes more and more skill to exploit a well-maintained system. Unfortunately, this has made many cybercriminals shift their perspective and target the end users of the systems they want to access.

To do this, many attacks will now lean on the quirks of human psychology and use methods like phishing and other forms of social engineering to play on a user’s curiosity, trust, and fear… and while these attacks are better known now that they’ve received some attention in mainstream media, many are still unaware and vulnerable.

This means it is essential that your team members are prepared to deal with such threats. Let’s go over how this can be accomplished by reviewing some best practices to follow:

How to Train Your Team to Be Cybersecurity Assets

Keep Things Consistent

Instead of providing training in semi-annual, hours-long seminars, it helps to commit to more frequent, short bursts. These brief sessions are more digestible and allow you to more effectively add variety to your training methods to keep your team engaged and receptive. This will boost how well your team retains the lessons shared.

Use Practical Evaluations

Learning about a cyberattack like phishing is one thing… encountering one is another entirely. By launching simulated phishing attacks against your team, you can determine how prepared they are to deal with the real thing and identify any weak spots that need to be focused on more.

Reinforce Best Practices Through Policy

Rather than relying on your team to abide by best practices independently, it helps to put enforceable policies and standards in place to ensure they do. For instance, establishing minimum requirements for their passwords and filtering your business’ Internet connection are relatively simple changes that can have a big impact.

Crucially, Security Needs to Be Part of the Office Culture

This is perhaps the most essential aspect of promoting a security-first workplace environment: you must know that your team members are comfortable asking questions and coming forward with mistakes. Think about it—which sounds more dangerous, a threat that an employee accidentally enabled and immediately reported, or one that an employee accidentally enabled and immediately covered their tracks in the hope that nothing would happen?

You need to know that your team members know that they can report their mistakes without worrying about reprisal, apart from additional security training.

On top of that, security needs to be a universal focus, meaning that leadership needs to take an active role in promoting the cybersecurity measures that the business takes and emphasize that everyone does their part in ensuring security.

We Are Here to Help You Endorse Cybersecurity Awareness

We can step in and develop the kind of cybersecurity awareness and safeguards that your business needs to maintain. Call us at (847) 803-0044 to learn more about what we can do for you.