5 Ways Cybersecurity Awareness Acts as a Human Firewall for Organizations
It would be no exaggeration to say that the last two years have been the toughest for businesses of all sizes. In fact, with stringent restrictions laid across the globe to curb the pandemic, even the mere survival of companies had become a challenge.
Technologically strong companies opted a way out of this hassle by shifting to a hybrid working environment. A major portion of the workforce supported remotely while a meager percentage of employees worked from the office.
So, was that the solution to all the problems? Well, though businesses survived and continue to function to date in a virtual environment, the biggest challenge they face is that of cyber threats.
With employees working over public networks, the exposure to critical business information has increased thereby making it easier for hackers to access this information. Moreover, human errors due to inattentiveness and distractions in a work-from-home environment may also result in a data compromise.
According to statistics by a global cybersecurity education company, 95% of cybersecurity breaches occur due to human errors.
Therefore, the need of the hour is for businesses to create guardrails and prevent vulnerabilities that may result in a potential cyber-attack.
Table of Content
What Is the Best Way to Nurture a Cyber-Safe Working Environment?
Several techniques go into maintaining a cyber-safe work environment.
However, to begin with, it is cardinal to have a workforce that is wary about cyber-attacks and their impact on the company. This can be achieved through spreading cyber
awareness amongst your employees.Before we delve deeper, let’s understand more about cyber awareness for employees.
What Is Cyber Awareness and Why Is It Important for Employees?
At times, when you may have all the required elements to have a strong hardware/ software defense mechanism, negligent employees may prove to be a loophole.
While it may be difficult to find a compromised software to gain access and corrupt your network, taking advantage of a careless employee clicking right away on phishing emails, may be an easier way to gain entry into your network.
Therefore, your employees must be educated about identifying, reporting, and eliminating a cyber threat. This happens when your employees are cognizant of them.
Having said that, let’s now understand how cybersecurity awareness acts as a human firewall for organizations.
1. Educates Employees About the Different Forms of Cyberthreats
Human risks can be of different types. Your employees may be curious to click on a malicious link, check phishing emails, or download an attachment from an unknown source.
Cybersecurity awareness enables your employees to be enlightened about these hacking techniques. It helps your employees to be careful when clicking on links
and using public networks. Furthermore, this awareness ingests attentiveness when receiving emails from external sources.It educates your employees to be mindful of the different types of cyber-attacks like phishing emails and malicious links to name a few.
2. Emphasizes the Importance of Password Security
When was the last time you changed your email account password?
Most commonly, users tend to maintain the same password across different accounts. This password will include the name or name of a dear one with a guessable number.
It is important to understand that hackers easily zero down on such passwords. Therefore, you should train your employees about corporate password policies.
Cybersecurity awareness inculcates the habit of changing passwords periodically, not reusing passwords, and including a blend of alphabets, alphanumeric to form a strong password. This eliminates the chances of a password being compromised.
3. Enables to Identify and Report Cybersecurity Threat
Undoubtedly, employees are the ears and eyes of your organization. To protect your data, they should be able to identify and report a threat appropriately.
For example, if they receive an email from an unknown source that may be a phishing email, the employee should be able to recognize and block the ID with timely intervention from your company's IT team.
This move will also alert your IT team to take necessary remediations
and precautions to rule out the possibility of a possible cyber-attack in yet other ways.Cybersecurity awareness equips your employees with this knowledge to identify and report vulnerabilities on time.
4. Trains Employees about Email, Internet, and Social Media Policies
With the BYOD culture taking pace, employees are allowed to access confidential information from their devices irrespective of their location and the network they are connected to. This may pose serious threats to your data.
However, a cyber aware workforce is cautious when on a public network.
They understand the necessity of having updated firewalls, anti-virus, anti-malware software on their devices.Furthermore, cybersecurity awareness infuses the importance of maintaining duly patched systems thereby improving the level of cybersecurity.
5. Helps You Evaluate Your Current Status of Cybersecurity
A cyber-secure environment empowers you to periodically analyze your current organizational status and improve based on that. For example, you get a chance to evaluate the following:
- Where does your current cybersecurity awareness state stand?
- Are you updating your employees constantly on cybersecurity policies?
- Have you been measuring your cybersecurity KPIs?
- Are your employees happy, contented with the current program?
- Do you have appropriate policies, documents in place?
- How do you plan to improvise/add policies if required?
How can our Human Risk Management Platform help?
According to this report, one in five companies suffer a malicious data breach and 23% of these breaches occur due to human errors.A human error can be the result of inattentive/unintentional actions that may allow or contribute towards the spread of a data breach. This may be anything like your employee downloading a malware or a data compromise due to a weak password.
Click here for a free trial of our human risk management solution and check out how we can help you overcome human cyber risks!
Wrap Up
Cybersecurity awareness inculcates the much-needed attentiveness amongst your employee community to proactively identify and prevent cyber risks. It also rules out the chances of your employees’ committing errors and create instances of data compromises due to them.
Hopefully, the abovementioned points elaborate on the importance of cybersecurity awareness for your employees and how they can act like a human firewall for your organization.
About Us
Quantum Strides, a frontrunner in AI and cybersecurity solutions in the USA is initiating cybersecurity awareness training programs to nurture workplaces free from human risks.
Want to know more about our cybersecurity offerings? Feel free to visit our website or email us at cybersecurity@quantumstrides.com
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