Cyber Security Training For Employees: Importance of Employee Security Training and Best Practices
Employee cyber security training develops a human firewall around your organizational information infrastructure and prevents cyberattacks. With proper training, an organization can save millions and guarantee a robust cyber security posture.
As the number of cyber-attacks continues to rise, technological safeguards alone may not be sufficient to shield against the constant security threats. Cybercriminals always seek new ways to evade security measures, and cyber security technology may get compromised in several ways. While considering PPT or People, Process, Technology, if the technology fails, the ‘people’ part plays the most important part, and ‘employee’ training can compensate for the failure or absence of technological controls. There is thus a considerable need for training employees on cyber security and spreading cyber awareness among staff members. A high level of cyber security awareness among the members of an organization acts like a “Human firewall” and is a highly effective security measure.
Understanding the Importance of Employee Cyber Security Training
The State of IT Security Survey conducted in 2019 discovered that employee training and email security were among the biggest problems that cyber security professionals had to tackle. Employee security training is the first and most crucial step in the battle against cyberattackers. Organizations might have the best cyber security measures in place, but without proper training, their systems will get compromised.
Employee training provides employees with the insight to detect probable cyber attacks and teaches them to make informed decisions. Organizations can thus evade a significant number of cyberattacks that often begin with cybercriminals targeting an unsuspecting employee.
How Does Cyber Security Awareness Training For Employees Help?
The employees of an organization are among its most vulnerable elements when it comes to cyber-attacks. With the right training, however, employees can be transformed into an organization’s first line of defense.
Cyber security awareness training for employees performs the following functions:
- Ensures Proper Implementation of Security Measures: By keeping employees informed about best practices and common cyber threats, security measures can be implemented appropriately.
- Safeguard Against Social Engineering: A majority of breaches involve human errors. Well-trained employees can detect social engineering cues and report phishing attempts before they do any harm.
- Increases Efficiency: Cyber attacks can cause massive loss of resources. Cyber aware employees prevent attacks from occurring, thereby enhancing work efficiency.
- Better Reports: Employee training improves communication between staff, the security department, and management. Better reports can lead to the recovery of lost data and reduce compliance burdens.
- Increased Employee Satisfaction: Training is a great way to ensure satisfaction and abiding with organizational security guidelines. Trained employees are more confident in dealing with a potential cyber attack attempt.
Training Employees on Cyber Security Can Save Your Business Organization
Since cyber security training is aimed at increasing cyber hygiene among employees, it serves as an effective means of either stopping or minimizing the frequency of successful attacks on a business organization.
Proper training can teach employees necessary things like –
- Password security best practices
- Email, internet, and social media best practices
- Regulatory and legal obligations
- The organization’s data security policies
- Identification and reporting of threats
- And, most importantly the basic cyber hygiene
Such knowledge can prevent a large number of attacks from succeeding and can save business organizations from being compromised.
Developing a Cyber Aware Culture
A survey by Wombat Security Technologies found that more than 30% of employees were not even aware of concepts like malware or phishing. Such low levels of cyber awareness could explain how cybercrime is expected to cost the world almost $6 Trillion by 2021.
Establishing a cyber aware culture is the need of the hour for every organization. Aware employees can recognize threat vectors and respond to them by adopting safe online computing and social engineering countermeasures. Some ways to develop and ensuring an excellent cyber conscious culture are:
- Mandatory cyber security training
- Repeated training that is updated at regular intervals.
- A training that is curated to employee needs, and keeps them engaged.
- Gamification tricks to let employees feel recognized, appreciated and enthusiastic
Importance of Open Communication Between Employees and Management
When there is a synergy between employees and management, they can work in unison against threat actors. Healthy cyber communication:
- Ensures protection from data breaches and thus data loss
- Prevents cyberattacks or attempts
- Reduces the probability of insider threats such as disgruntled employees
- Ensures high team performance and collaboration
- Clears up doubts about company policies and vision
Final Words
Cyber awareness is the first and the most important step an organization can take towards cyber security and can protect its critical information assets. Hence, employee training is a wise investment and converts unwarranted employee actions and activities from ‘human’ mistakes to control measures in the ongoing struggle against cybercrime. Organizations will be able to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their sensitive and confidential business and customer information. For more info on how to protect your business from cyber threats and ways to educate your employees, visit our Scam School for links to more articles.
