21 Sep How to Train Your Employees on Cybersecurity
How can you train your employees on cybersecurity?
- Educate them about cyberattacks
- Encourage them to change passwords regularly
- Assess your employees
- Emphasize caution
Oftentimes, organizations overlook the importance of knowing how to train their employees on cybersecurity. They might have the false notion that cybersecurity training only falls on the responsibility of their IT department. However, this shouldn’t be the case.
While the IT sector of a company should ensure that all physical and non-physical systems used in an organization are well-protected from serious cyber threats, everyone involved should ultimately play a part. Individual employees’ computers may not necessarily be closely-monitored 24/7.
By adopting a series of good internet habits and practices, they can protect themselves and avoid a potentially all-encompassing cyber threat to the company. Continue reading to learn more.
Educate them about cyberattacks
Computer viruses are a subset of the umbrella term that you may come to understand as “cyberattacks”. These malicious entities have the capability to exponentially spread from system to system, as well as across networks. If the virus is particularly advanced, it can proliferate in an unmitigated fashion until all components end up infecting each other.
Like your typical biological virus, cyberattacks grow to become more advanced. With the advancement of technology, comes new ways of programming harmful content. As such, it’s important that your organization makes it a point to educate your employees about contemporary cyberattacks that they should watch out for.
Make sure that your employees are constantly reminded of such threats like eavesdropping attacks, malware, adware, spyware, and the like. Once you take this step, your employees would become aware of the nature of these cybersecurity threats. For example, eavesdropping attacks typically involve the interception of a network. Cybercriminals make an assessment of a network’s condition. They are then able to identify weak points which they can infiltrate — and more often than not, these vulnerabilities are a result of weak passwords or encryption.
In order to avoid this situation from taking place, your employees would begin adopting techniques like adding security to their files or avoiding websites that have not been deemed safe to visit.
Encourage them to change passwords regularly
Your employees might not always be visiting websites that are work-related. You should already expect that they’ll be visiting and accessing their social media accounts using your company’s hardware, or other physical assets. Another simple tip when it comes to cybersecurity education is to constantly remind your employees about the need to make use of strong passwords that are difficult to figure out.
Devices like computers, laptops, tablets, and even smartphones — if they’re connected to the company network — can already be prone to network threats if they’re not properly secured. While there’s no standard on how often passwords should be changed, it’s important to conduct this at least on a bi-monthly basis. Stronger passwords are usually formulated through using a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers. The longer the password is, the more secure it can be, and the harder it is for attackers to figure out.
Assess your employees
It’s likely that your employees already have a conceptualization of cybersecurity. This makes cybersecurity awareness training easier on your organization’s part, since you don’t have to start from the ground-up in training your employees.
With this in mind, it may be useful for you to provide them with an assessment that gauges how well they know about arming themselves against cybersecurity attacks. The examination for this kind of scenario is typically understood to be pentesting or penetration testing. Crafting a pentest requires rigorous planning on your end, but it usually involves a simulated cyberattack that is deployed on a computer or system.
In many ways, a pentest measures your employees’ proclivity to become impressionable in the face of social engineering. A pentest can be done in simple ways. For example, an employee is unknowingly sent an email that contains a link to a seemingly-reputable website. What they don’t know is that the site is actually spurious and is only meant to imitate. Cybersecurity competence of your employees can be measured through analytics that can show how many employees divulged their personal information, or even so much as clicked on the link.
Emphasize caution
It’s understood that people don’t really realize the gravity of a given situation unless it happens directly to them. It may already be safe for you to assume that your employees aren’t necessarily able to comprehend cybersecurity threats unless they’ve been involved in it one way or another.
Letting your employees know about past security experiences experienced by your company can already go a long way in informing them about their responsibilities. Let’s say for example that you own a bank. A combination of poor security and human error may one day cause a network breach in your bank. Your customers’ personal information ends up falling into the wrong hands. Though you’ve eventually been able to take the upper hand in this massive data breach, it has certainly made you and your employees more cautious.
Who knew that simple anecdotes can already influence your employees’ attention towards cybersecurity? After all, past experiences set the standard for future-decision making. This is one method of cybersecurity training that requires very few resources — it even has the capability of making each individual employee realize the ever-present and looming threat of cyberattacks.
Key Takeaway
If you find yourself one day asking the question of how to train your employees on cybersecurity, then more often than not, your company’s IT infrastructure isn’t really robust. Due to this, it’s critical that you make strides towards educating your employees on cybersecurity protection. Through a range of simple and complicated techniques like assessing your employees’ knowledge, or simply imparting knowledge to them, protecting the company altogether is certainly possible.
In any cybersecurity endeavor, Direc Business should be your partner. With a range of cybersecurity solutions, we have everything you need to maximize your business process. Click here to get in touch!