Cybersecurity Training Must Be a Priority

The nature of many of today’s businesses is building one product over and over and over. When you have that level of repetitiveness, it helps people find their niche, yes, but it can also result in the attention given to the task to suffer. While a disengaged employee is nothing new, they can cause some operational problems. By and large, a couple of staff hiccups won’t have a huge impact on your business, unless that lack of engagement impacts your cybersecurity. That’s because there are some threats out there that could absolutely cripple your business’ ability to sustain operations. Today, we’ll talk about how to get your staff to care about malware, hackers, and the like. 

What are the Threats?

The average employee comes to work and does their job. That doesn’t sound like a problem, until you start hearing the usual, “that isn’t my job” excuse to why things are going haywire. You need to make it known that solid cybersecurity practices are, in fact, part of the job you are paying them for. Employees don’t often see how it is their responsibility to protect the business from cyberattacks, but 90 percent of cybercrime happens as a result of user error. The truth is phishing attacks can absolutely bury your business. Making sure your staff understands that they are on the front lines is imperative.

Get Your Staff Engaged

The best way to get the people that work for you to understand where their efforts fit in is to put together a comprehensive data security policy. By outlining all the ways their actions have an effect on the organization’s network security, it will become clear that they have a significant role to play in mitigating threats. You will also want to provide thorough training so that they completely understand what it is they are working to avoid. 

Here Are Some Solid Practices

Cybersecurity awareness training costs companies a lot of capital and time. This expense is not without its risks, however. Before you spend thousands of dollars to have a professional come in and train your staff, only to have them make a mistake anyway, we thought we’d help by providing some of the main talking points you would find in the curriculum of one of these cybersecurity awareness courses. 

• Threats - Providing employees the information about the threats they are up against, who is deploying those threats, and how they could end up putting your organization in danger. 
• Password policies - Most businesses have some sort of password policy for access to sensitive information. Going through the NIST best practices with them will go a long way toward helping them understand what constitutes a strong password, and why they’re important. 
• Web practices and protection - Informing them how they are protected, and what they have to be on the lookout for.
• Email practices and protection - Like the web protections, you have specific solutions installed that are aimed to protect your organization from unwanted phishing threats. 
• Preventative measures - These are proactive practices that can help keep them, and your network safe.

Educating your employees is an essential step in protecting your data, your clients’ data, and your business’ reputation.

If you would like help ensuring your staff understands your organization’s security strategies and follows industry best practices, reach out to Computerware today at (703) 821-8200.