7 Tips for your Businesses Cybersecurity Training
When it comes to cybersecurity, the biggest threat to your business is your employees. Almost all security breaches in companies are the result of an employee accidentally allowing a malicious person or malware gain access to sensitive information. Therefore, cybersecurity training should be a top priority of yours if you want effective protection. What kind of things should you be doing to effectively teach your employees? We recommend these 7 tips to effectively implement cybersecurity training.
1. Have support from the top down. No one likes a hypocrite. If you tell your team that they need to encrypt their emails, and then don’t encrypt them yourself, then why should they listen to your instructions? Upper management needs to be on the same page about the precautions being put in place and effectively project that mentality onto the rest of the staff. Strong, effective leaders do so by leading by example. This stands true when it comes to cybersecurity.
2. Create a culture focused on privacy. Creating a culture of privacy is essential if you want people to actually care about what they click and how cautious they are before it’s too late. Some organizations don’t stress cautious behavior, and as a result they are way more likely to be breached. Having privacy be one of the pillars of your business culture will result in employees being much more cautious in sketchy situations. You can also present the information as a way to protect themselves for identity theft, so that this mentality follows your team out of the office and into their homes.
3. Continuous training. The world of cybersecurity is constantly changing. For your cybersecurity training to be relevant you need to be evolving with it. You should refresh your employees quarterly on their training and update them on any new tactics being used to steal sensitive information. Make sure the training is specific to each department so that what they are learning is relevant to what they see daily on the job. Having a newsletter that updates you on new threats in trends in the cybersecurity world will make staying educated easy.
4. Have “Live fire” exercises and fake phishing attacks. Speaking of continuous training, it is recommended you have some sort of fake hacking attempt every once and awhile to test your employees on what they have learned from your cybersecurity training. After all, practice makes perfect. Groff NetWorks provides phishing tests randomly sent to all members of an organization to see how many people fall into the trap. The method can be used as a wake-up call with no consequence to those who click the phishing email as well as a way to track progress and improvement to show that your cybersecurity training isn’t for nothing.
5. Have training be personal. Keep the cybersecurity training relatable for your employees. Don’t use words the average person wouldn’t understand when discussing and give examples of cybersecurity threats from both a work perspective and a personal perspective. Like I mentioned earlier, if your employee cares about security at work and at home, they will be a much more reasonable worker from a security standpoint. Keeping the training personal will encourage them to do this.
6. Stress security at work and at home. As mentioned earlier, your cybersecurity training should focus on protection of the business as well as protection for yourself. Getting your employees to be cautious about what they click on at home will result in them caring more about what they click on at work as well. You don’t want your people to be cautious because you’ve told them to be, you want them to be cautious because they are genuinely concerned about clicking a malicious link, or exposing information and opening a window for a cybercriminal. This will result in smarter, safer employees.
7. Consult a professional. Having a technology partner will enhance your training as well as take a load of stress off your shoulders. An expert staff will guide you through proper lessons and rules to teach your staff and grant you access to tools you wouldn’t have otherwise (like the fake phishing live fire exercises.)
Cybersecurity training is more important now than it ever was. Following these tips will help make your small business prepared for the inevitable attacks you will see hackers throw at you. Having a technology partner like Groff NetWorks will help you prepare and protect against these attacks, help you see them coming, and in the worst-case scenario, handle the aftermath of a breach. Contact us today to defend your business.