Why Cybersecurity Awareness Is Important For Every Employee

What Is Cybersecurity Awareness?

Cybersecurity awareness is the combination of both knowing and doing something to protect a business’s information assets. When an enterprise’s employees are cyber security aware, it means they understand what cyber threats are, the potential impact a cyber-attack will have on their business and the steps required to reduce risk and prevent cyber-crime infiltrating their online workspace. it’s crucial to highlight that these were the strains that cyber security companies had found and identified. As new strains of malware grow, enterprises need to ensure that they’re implementing the appropriate security measures, educating their employees and eliminating any weaknesses that make them vulnerable to an attack. Human error is an egregious exploit that can lead to fines and severe business damage.

The Importance Of Cybersecurity

Colleagues need to understand the role they play in strengthening a business’s cyber security. In most cases, it needs to be taken back to the very basics. Cyber-crime shows no signs of slowing down, and a cyber-attack has the potential to incapacitate an organisation. Training your employees and making them aware is not only your best defence - it also shows you’re paving your way to a more GDPR compliant future. Should you find your company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, the ICO will look at the preventative measures you have put in place beforehand. It is crucial for businesses to implement the most basic cyber security measures, and cyber security awareness for employees is one of them.

Why Is Cybersecurity Awareness And Training For Employees A Must?

In today’s era, most of the organizations have shifted their businesses online. Many of the services are present on cloud. Customers are accessing services on applications and websites. It is, therefore, very important to ensure the cyber security of an organization. For more than a decade, organizations have been investing in traditional cyber security measures like Firewall, sophisticated IT protocol, comprehensive cyber security defence etc. It becomes extremely important for organizations to strengthen the most vital and crucial link of an organization’s cyber security; its employees.

Why Do Attackers Target Employees?

To damage the reputation of an organization: Organizations may still recover from a financial loss but any harm to its reputation can destroy it completely. Customers start losing their trust in the organization thus, harming the organizations’ reputation permanently.

Why Do Employees Need Cybersecurity Awareness And Security Training?

Every employee in the organization is a probable target when it comes to cyber-attacks. Cyber attackers have different attack methodology for different level of employees, therefore, increasing the scope of probable victims. As per the statistics, 90% of the cyber attacks are a result of employee negligence. Two-third of the employees have admitted that they have very limited knowledge of cyber security. One- third had a very blurry knowledge about ransomware whereas half of the employees were unable to recognise the concept of point-of-sale malware. In fact, a survey found that 97% of the employees could not even identify phishing attack.
To worsen the situation, less than half of the organizations find themselves ready to fight cyber-attacks along with the increasing sophistication and the advancement in cyber-attacks. Hackers are constantly evolving their approaches and deployment methodology and thus, organizations should constantly upgrade their defence training to keep the vulnerabilities low. Cyber security and awareness training helps organizations in training and educating employees about different threats and the methodology used by attackers to deploy various cyber-attacks. Tools like ThreatCop help in developing a defence mechanism against cyber attacks with its four-step cycle that includes simulating cyber-attacks and learning modules related to them. Organizations have seen up to 72% reduction in the cyber-attacks with appropriate cyber security training. With periodic learning modules, employees can gradually rewire themselves to identify cyber threats and defend themselves against real life cyber-attacks.

Detect And Plan For What You Can’t Prevent

Hackers will always try and find a vulnerability, and when they do you need to make sure you have the resources and knowledge to detect their activities as quickly as possible. This way, you can contain the damage and get back to normal business without experiencing a massive loss event. Implementing a security information and event management (SIEM) solution will aggregate logs from applications, operating systems, and network infrastructure appliances across the enterprise. It will then analyse the data to identify any questionable activity and flag it to the appropriate people.
It’s clear that the weakest link in cyber security is the human factor, and if your employees are unable to make an informed and educated decision about something as simple as what network to connect to or which email attachment to open, you’re at risk of a potentially devastating cyber-attack. Your business’s cyber security is only as strong as your weakest employee - it is your responsibility to create a risk aware workplace culture surrounding cyber security awareness.

---