Cybersecurity Awareness - Building The Bridge Between The Security Folks And The Rest of The Organisation!
Cybersecurity awareness and how to bridge the gap between the IT department and the organisation!
Cybersecurity Awareness- Building The Bridge Between The Security Folks And The Rest of The Organisation!
Our duty as corporate executives is to ensure that everyone views cybersecurity as a crucial component of their job. Cybersecurity awareness includes understanding the risks associated with online interaction, email checking, and web browsing. Being aware of cybersecurity in everyday situations is referred to as cybersecurity awareness.
SPF records and DNS cache poisoning are ideas that not every employee in a business needs to grasp, but arming each employee with knowledge pertinent to their position helps them stay secure online—both at work and at home. Role-based training is the best approach to prepare technical and non-technical workers for the appropriate cybersecurity threats.
For your general workforce, cybersecurity awareness could mean something slightly different than it does for technical teams. Your IT personnel must be knowledgeable about data management, authorisation, and laws, but the rest of your company may not need to be. Building a cybersecurity awareness programme that inspires long-lasting behaviour change depends on providing each team with the proper training.
Cybersecurity awareness goals
Management must be aware that 95% of cybersecurity breaches result from human mistakes while encouraging cybersecurity awareness among staff. Reducing these risks through education and awareness is one of the objectives of cybersecurity awareness.
Cybersecurity investments can decrease vulnerabilities in the workplace by promoting employee awareness and education. Therefore, management has to make cybersecurity education and awareness a top priority of any cybersecurity strategy.
Employees must also be aware that cybercriminals favour them as their primary targets. Hackers see people with access and credentials as soft targets that are simple to control. The data that hackers desire is readily available to employees.
The second objective of raising cybersecurity awareness is to educate staff members about their vulnerability to hackers and their roles and responsibilities for minimising risk exposure. As was previously discussed, you need to alter employees’ attitudes toward cybersecurity to persuade them to adopt these cybersecurity habits.
The perception among employees today is that cybersecurity exists to make work more difficult. The fact that cybersecurity is not a component of employees’ jobs is another frequent grievance. It would help if you altered employee perceptions of cybersecurity to combat these attitudes. We want employees to understand that they all have a role to play in cybersecurity and that everyone can gain from implementing cybersecurity best practices into their work.
Why Cybersecurity Awareness is Important
Everyone in your organisation, from the workers to the board members, should be concerned about cybersecurity. Cybersecurity threats approach your systems from all sides and through all entry points, looking for even the slightest openings to compromise them. Additionally, a single cyberattack might have an impact on the entire company. Raising cybersecurity awareness will become evident if you consider the various ways a breach could take place and its effects on your company. Key cybersecurity issues include:
Unplanned Downtime
A cyberattack might disrupt all of your business operations. Large-scale effects frequently occur when businesses use outdated technology that no longer receives security updates. For hackers already aware of its weaknesses, such technology is an easy target. Additionally, the antiquated technology will require ongoing updating by IT professionals, and even these processes can have unintended consequences.
However, outdated technology is not the only source of risk. An attack might have similarly devastating repercussions if a successful—and straightforward—phishing scheme was used. Your entire business is impacted by unforeseen downtime, which also costs you time and money.
Loss of Personal Data and Intellectual Property
Protecting sensitive information is one of the main reasons businesses take cybersecurity precautions. For instance, manufacturers have important trade secrets for their brands and products. This covers any intellectual property your business has and everything from credit cards to social security numbers.
According to a 2020 IBM analysis, it takes an average of 275 days to discover and recognise a data breach. This gives hackers an unpleasant time to gather private information that is essential to your company’s smooth functioning and profitability.
Damaged Reputation and Trust
Your company’s reputation is on the line, another reason cybersecurity concerns need to be on the radar of every employee and board member. Understanding cybersecurity can aid in preventing assaults that would otherwise harm your reputation and cause clients to lose faith in you.
However, awareness extends beyond prevention when it comes to this specific risk. Practice how your clients will respond to the news, how you’ll keep your business moving forward, and what steps you’ll take to uphold your reputation. If and when a breach happens, you must also have a plan for disaster recovery, business continuity, and reputation management. You’ll either lose or preserve your clients’ faith, depending on how you respond.
These examples demonstrate that cybersecurity risk is a business risk. Additionally, cybersecurity must be a company-wide initiative with support at all levels. Your workforce will better realise that cybersecurity awareness is a concern for everyone if you develop a risk-based strategy and identify the areas of greatest concern for your company. Everyone has a vital role, from the break room to the boardroom. It is a shared responsibility across all people, processes, and technological controls.
What Is Cyber Hygiene?
The same principles apply to cyber hygiene as they do to human hygiene. Cyber hygiene refers to the practises that enable computers and other connected devices to operate at their peak efficiency. Cyber hygiene also makes it possible to identify and solve computer issues quickly. Tasks include employing network firewalls, installing antivirus software, and creating strong passwords that are updated frequently.
Professionals in cybersecurity help maintain the security of networks, operating systems, printer hardware, and other pieces of technology. Every device linked through an access point is weak. By considering different threats, good cyber hygiene helps prevent those vulnerabilities. By preventing malware and other threats from penetrating networks and devices, this approach aids both individuals and companies in maintaining their data’s security.
Cyber hygiene best practices include:
- Scanning for viruses and installing antivirus and malware software
- Preventing unwanted people from accessing information by using firewalls
- Updating all devices’ operating systems, web browsers, and applications regularly
- Wiping and reformatting hard discs to keep them clean
- Using multifactor authentication and changing passwords
Cyber hygiene for organisations calls for a two-pronged strategy. Businesses must address both technological and non-technical challenges. Security controls, or risk-reduction techniques, are at the forefront of technical concerns. They consist of safety-preserving hardware, software, and other components. Non-technical challenges include personnel training, security awareness, and the policies and procedures that corporations use to manage security.
Benefits of Cyber Hygiene
Cyber hygiene benefits people, both personally and professionally. For instance, excellent cyber hygiene may have stopped the catastrophic Equifax data hack, saving the organisation millions of dollars and its good name. A public health emergency like the COVID-19 epidemic might also provide remote workers with more assurance. Cyber hygiene aids by reducing the possibility that hackers will exploit security flaws:
- Protect a business’s data and client information
- Avoid phishing attempts and other malicious activity
- Keep devices and computers running well
- Locate unmanaged assets
- Find unauthorised software on a system
- Safeguard against ransomware and malware
- Identify and fix outdated admin privileges from former employees, etc.
Businesses and individuals who disregard cyber hygiene risk running into various issues. Maintenance is necessary for software and computers to function correctly and prevent more significant problems like data loss due to corruption or hacking and missing data.
How can you ensure good cyber hygiene?
Here’s how to use these cyber hygiene best practices to maintain the security of your data and yourself online.
Updating your passwords will make them more safe and distinctive
Often, the only thing preventing scammers from accessing your accounts is your passwords. Your online security practice must include creating and using strong, secure, and unique passwords.
On all of your accounts, enable two-factor authentication (2FA).
Even if your password is the strongest in the world, it could still be compromised, leaked, or phished. Two-factor authentication (2FA) increases security by requiring a one-time-use code in addition to your password. Thus, even if hackers were to learn your password, they would be unable to access your accounts.
Install antivirus software, then check frequently for malware.
Viruses and other harmful software are found and eliminated from your devices by antivirus software. You ought to install antivirus software on your gadgets, at the very least.
Back up your data at regular intervals
Because of data backups, you can always restore files in the case of data loss following a security breach. To periodically back up your data on Apple devices, use Time Machine. For Windows users, utilise File History.
Set your operating system and software up for automatic updates.
Malware frequently makes use of outdated software in its creation. Regularly updating your hardware and software ensures that you always have the most recent security fixes to defend against emerging online threats.
Remove your personal information from social media
On social media, seemingly safe personal information can turn lethal in the wrong hands. It is simpler for a hostile actor to pose as you or create phishing attacks to access your accounts the more information they have about you.
Encrypt your data
Your data is protected by data encryption, which encrypts it using challenging algorithms. This implies that even if your files are stolen, the thieves cannot access them.
Stay up to date with online threats (and know how to spot a scammer)
You risk being vulnerable if you don’t keep up with cyber security concerns. An essential part of proper cyber hygiene is learning about the hazards you face and how to spot con artists.
Implementing cyber security awareness training
The following advice will help you launch your cyber security awareness programme:
- Consider your requirements
The “one-size-fits-all” strategy is unacceptable for all organisations regarding staff awareness.
You must first take into account your company’s varied needs and corporate culture to personalise your employee awareness training programme for success.
- Set metrics for success
A staff awareness programme needs to be successful before it is implemented, and its effectiveness needs to be measured. Before you begin, you must choose the metrics you’ll employ and perform measurements to establish a standard.
- Be thorough
Giving your staff a brief introduction to the GDPR does not constitute staff awareness training. Instead, it should include a comprehensive programme that ensures every employee knows your organisation’s policies and practices around handling personal data.
- Engage your staff
The effectiveness of your programme depends on engaging staff training. By incorporating thought-provoking exercises, your personnel will thoroughly grasp the significant changes brought about by the GDPR and the obligations that will affect their day-to-day work.
Gamification, a popular method for increasing participant engagement in security awareness programmes, incorporates game-inspired behavioural motivators such as prizes, competitiveness, and loss aversion.
- Focus on behaviour, not knowledge
Employees must comprehend how the content relates to them in their traditional roles if they are to modify their behaviour.
It’s crucial to give your team context for what they are learning and practical examples they can use to close the knowledge-to-action gap. This will aid in bringing about the crucial cultural change that will make security an integral part of daily operations.
- Time it right
Your employees may need training immediately, but it doesn’t mean your awareness programme should be implemented immediately. Instead, think about implementing the programme gradually so you may fulfil specific pressing needs before fine-tuning and improving it.
- Play the long game
Your employee awareness programme should be an ongoing process that starts with induction and is reinforced by frequent updates throughout the year or whenever staff-related security events occur if you want it to be successful in the long run.
From Awareness to Culture
While raising employees’ awareness of cybersecurity issues is a start, for it to be genuinely effective, they must voluntarily accept and actively adopt cyber-secure practices on both a professional and personal level. This is referred to as a security culture or culture of security. An organisation’s collective awareness, attitudes, and behaviours regarding security are referred to as its security culture.
Research from the CMMI Institute and ISACA has demonstrated that, among other quantifiable advantages, companies with solid cybersecurity cultures have better insight into possible threats, fewer cyber incidents, and higher post-attack resilience.
Organisations that have significantly invested in creating safety cultures to lower workplace incident rates can teach us all a lot. Organisations invested in their prevention through staff education when they realised that safety accidents, like security incidents, were expensive and deadly.
For this to be effective, they needed to go beyond raising awareness and ensuring that safety procedures were accepted as part of the working culture. Thanks to OSHA training, you wouldn’t go near a construction site without a hard hat nowadays. Creating a security culture can eliminate errors like entering the same password multiple times or opening malicious files.
Make security training relevant to employees, so they understand how cybersecurity affects them at work and outside of it for security culture to be most effective. Security training might benefit them at home much as learning to bend with your knees.
This kind of thinking is more crucial than ever in the hybrid workforce of today. As managers, we are responsible for drawing connections and aiding staff members in comprehending the advantages of security education. You can establish a security culture and modify long-lasting behaviour when you get there.
Security Awareness Training Has Limits
An essential element of a security culture is security awareness. Organisations need to concentrate on securing their perimeter since employees lead digital lives that blur the lines between their personal and professional locations. By making individuals aware of how their behaviour, whether on company property or off, affects their employer’s information security, security awareness helps strengthen what infosec specialists like to refer to as the weakest link in an organisation – people.
However, businesses often base their awareness campaigns exclusively on training courses and sometimes supplementary readings like newsletters. Although it should be a part of every awareness programme, high-quality training has a small geographic scope.
