Your Biggest Cybersecurity Risk: Your Employees

With remote work gaining traction and decentralized workspaces becoming the new norm, businesses must strengthen their cybersecurity strategies to counter human errors and data breaches perpetrated by malicious insiders. All employees can expose weaknesses that can be exploited by cybercriminals.

Every employee must realize that even a minor mistake can snowball into a terrible security disaster for the company. They need to understand that your business’ Cybersecurity is also their responsibility.  Developing a security culture that includes employee education and training is a step in the right direction.

Corporate Cybersecurity Risk: Employees are a Weak Link

An untrained employee can compromise your business security in multiple ways. Some of the most common errors employees may make include:

1. Falling for phishing scams:

Cybercriminals use improved techniques, like spoofed emails and text messages, to propagate scams. Given the upward climb of data breaches, essential to improve staff education and training on spotting a phishing email or text message. A single error can cost you thousands or millions of dollars, with a lot of time and effort put into diagnosing the problem.

2. Bad password hygiene:

Some employees might reuse the same password or a set of passwords for multiple accounts (business and personal).  This dangerous habit allows cybercriminals to crack your business’ network security.  It puts your business and customers data at risk.

3. Responding to hacker e-mail with sensitive information:

Even slight carelessness can lead to an employee sending sensitive, business-critical information to a hacker. Such an act can cause lasting damage to your business, which is why you must be prepared to counter it.

4. Inconsistent patch management:

Often, employees can delay the deployment of a security patch sent to their device. This can lead to IT security vulnerabilities in your business if left unaddressed.

The bottom line is that cybercriminals work around the clock 24/7 and are upgrading their arsenal every day. They have a plethora of options to trap your employees. So, security awareness training has become more important than ever before.

Security Awareness Training: A Key Element to Manage Cybersecurity Risk

Your employees can quickly turn into an expensive liability. In this new era, cyber threats take place at the speed of light. Cybersecurity is a collaborative effort for every business, and you must prepare your employees to meet its challenges. Every employee should know that even a minor slip-up can result in a cybersecurity breach — which is why it’s crucial to ensure ongoing training on how to spot and respond to today and tomorrow’s threats.

You can transform your business’ key cybersecurity risk – your employees – into its prime defense against threats by developing a security culture that emphasizes adequate and regular security awareness training.

Improve Your Cybersecurity Posture with a Proactive Approach

In addition to taking a proactive approach to employee training, we believe that developing a solid security culture happens when a proactive approach is taken to managing your entire cybersecurity solution.

That is the driving force behind the Istonish Defend-8 Cybersecurity Solution. With a proactive approach, we help you to improve eight domains of your IT security infrastructure continuously. In addition to Employee Training, the other security domains include Network and Endpoint Vulnerability, Environment and Access Control, External Vulnerability, Environment Life Cycle Analysis, Infrastructure Foundational Resilience, Policies and Practices, and Physical Security.

Making all this happen will require continued effort and may seem like an uphill climb, but with the right partner by your side, you can easily integrate security awareness training into your business’ cybersecurity strategy. The first step towards training and empowering your employees starts with an email to us. Contact Istonish today to get started..