You might have an outstanding cyber security plan in your business, but if your employees do not understand how to follow that plan, it is essentially worthless. Therefore, it’s extremely important that all of your company’s employees be trained in how they can protect your business’s systems from cyber-attacks.
Here are a few steps to set up a quality employee cyber security training program:
Get everyone on board. You need to make it clear that cyber security is a priority for everyone at all levels of the organization, from the very top on down. A single person being careless with the way they use company systems could open up a vulnerability for an attack. Approximately 20 % of all malicious attacks are caused by employee negligence — that’s a huge amount of cyber-attacks that could be completely avoided by people following proper cyber security protocol they’d learn during training.
Raise awareness about cyber security. For many employees, cyber security is understandably the last thing on their mind as they go about their daily work. Therefore, awareness of the risks and how to combat them needs to reach such a level that complying with security standards becomes second nature. Staff should be trained on how to handle confidential information, how to safely send emails, how to follow security best practices, and what steps to take if a breach occurs. Simply having employees aware of what a potential problem would look like and how to prevent those problems will go a long way toward improving overall cyber security.
Test your employees’ security skills. There are a variety of options on how you would go about this. You might create a simple cyber security quiz to have employees complete. You might create a mock-phishing attack and see how employees respond. You can work with outside agencies to determine how best to implement such a test and how to track its success.
Constantly revisit security. It never hurts to remind employees of the importance of cyber security in the workplace. If you do administer a quiz, make sure employees know which questions they got wrong and why. If you have a security breach, use it as an opportunity to provide further education to your employees.
Cyber security in the workplace must be everyone’s responsibility.
For more information about training your employees in best practices for cyber security, contact us at Viyu today.