Employees Are the Weakest Link in your Cybersecurity

Cybercriminals work non-stop to find gaps in your cybersecurity that they can exploit. The only chance of defense a business has against these nefarious threats are a robust cybersecurity posture for your GTA business. However, having a concrete cyber strategy isn’t the only crucial element here. Business owners can sometimes overlook the fact that their employees may be the weakest link, ultimately exposing their organization to cyber threats. With the upward rise in remote work and decentralized workspaces becoming more common, cybersecurity needs to be the number one focus now more than ever to counter for the expected human error.

If there is no ongoing security training and awareness programs available to your employees, then it’s time you seriously consider it. Your employees are your first line of defense when it comes to preventing cyber attacks from hurting your business. A well-trained employee can quickly identify a threat when they see one and deflate any potential attacks from escalating into a disaster.

Why are Employees Vulnerable to Cyber Threats?

Human error is still very much the driving force behind the majority of cybersecurity problems. In fact, Researchers from Stanford University and a top cybersecurity organization found that approximately 88% of all data breaches were caused by an employee mistake.

An untrained employee can compromise your business’ security in multiple ways.

Some of the most common errors committed by employees include:

• Deceiving Phishing Scams:
  • With the pandemic being a highly stressful time for everyone, hackers leveraged this unfortunate time to trick the vulnerable and unsuspecting. They have used everything from phishing emails and text messages, to propagate the ongoing scam. Your employees must be well-trained to counter it.

• Bad password hygiene:
  • Some of your employees might reuse the same password or a set of passwords for multiple accounts (business and personal), which is a dangerous habit that allows cybercriminals to crack your business’ network security.
• Misdelivery:
  • 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.
• Inadequate patch management:
  • Often, employees can delay the deployment of a security patch sent to their device, which can lead to security vulnerabilities in your business’ IT security if left unaddressed. 

The bottom line is that with cybercriminals upgrading their arsenal every day and exploring a plethora of options to trap your employees, security awareness training has become more important than ever before.

Security Awareness Training: An Essential Investment

A one-time training program will neither help your employees repel cyberthreats nor help your business develop a security culture. To deal with the growing threat landscape, your employees need thorough and regular security awareness training.

You must never back out of providing continual security awareness training to your employees just because of the time and money you need to invest in it. The return on investment will be visible in the form of better decision-making employees who efficiently respond in the face of adversity, ultimately saving your business from data breaches, damage to reputation and potentially expensive lawsuits. The following statistics highlight why you should deploy regular security awareness training and consider it a necessary investment:

• Eighty percent of organizations experience at least one compromised account threat per month. ¹
• Sixty-seven percent of data breaches result from human error, credential theft or social attack. ²
• Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, phishing attacks have gone up by 67 percent. ³

Expecting your employees to train themselves on how to detect and respond to cyberthreats certainly isn’t the best way to deal with an ever-evolving threat landscape. You must take on the responsibility of providing regular training to your employees to ensure you adequately prepare them to identify and ward off potential cyberattacks.

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

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 at [email protected]!

Article curated and used by permission.

Sources:

1. McAfee Cloud Adoption & Risk Report
2. Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report
3. Security Magazine Verizon Data Breach Dig