Best Practices For Cyber Security Awareness Training

In today’s virtual world where cyber crime is rampant, cyber security awareness is more important than ever. But just how do organisations, companies, and businesses ensure employees don’t fall for cyber threats? Or what are the best practices for employee cyber security training awareness? 

In this article, you’re going to learn eight cyber security training awareness best practices. 

So, whether you’re an employee, a business owner, or a security professional, this article is for you.

What is Cybersecurity Awareness Training?

According to statistics, 85% of data breaches happen due to human error. With the rapid growth of virtual crime, there is probably no business or company that can ignore cybersecurity awareness. Unfortunately, most organisations, companies, and businesses focus on installing firewalls, sophisticated IT protocols, and other cybersecurity defence mechanisms. They forget or don’t pay attention to cyber security awareness.

The results?  All the costly cyber security defence systems don’t actually prevent infiltration by cyber criminals.
Typically, employees are the easiest link for malicious people looking to access secure networks and harm. For instance, email-borne threats target human beings by asking users to click on a link, open an attachment or enter a password to access certain information.

Once the users do what’s requested, they expose information that malicious people can use to penetrate cyber security defences.

Cybersecurity awareness training involves keeping employees aware of the different threats they need to watch out for or actions they take that could jeopardize an organisation’s network security. During cyber security training awareness, employees are educated about what threats are, how they are executed, and how they should respond or act to counter or prevent the threat from happening.

The main aim of cybersecurity awareness training is to prevent security breaches from occurring as a result of human error.

No matter how sophisticated an organisation’s cyber security defence systems are, if users aren’t aware of how to detect/spot malicious links or fraudulent emails, their systems will be compromised. That’s where cyber security awareness training becomes helpful. Now that you understand the importance of cyber security awareness training, let’s talk about the best practices for helping employees prevent or counter cyber threats.

Understand Your Employees Prior Awareness About Cybersecurity

First things first, because you start or create a cyber security awareness training program, you should determine how knowledgeable your employees are when it comes to cybersecurity. This is especially true for employees who handle or use gadgets that are connected to the Internet.

Refrain From Using a One-Size-Fits-All Approach

One of the costly mistakes most IT professionals make during cyber security awareness training is to use a one-size-fits-all formula. There is a lot to be done and using this formula can make it hard to explore all available avenues that can help to make the training effective.

Refrain From Using Fear

Fear is used so often to motivate people but when it comes to cyber security awareness training, it can hinder correct actions by employees who fear getting into trouble. In most cases, using fear during cyber security training awareness can be counterproductive and ineffective when it comes to changing lasting behaviours. A good idea is to appeal to users’ confidence in their ability to take secure actions.

Conduct Cyber Security Training Regularly

Cyber threats are evolving constantly. As IT professionals continue inventing ways and approaches to counter cyber threats, criminals are also finding new ways to stay on top. Organisations might hold their training one week and the next week cyber criminals find a new way of infiltrating the defence system. For that reason, organisations should conduct cybersecurity training regularly to ensure users have the knowledge to detect potential cyber threats and prevent or respond accordingly.

Determine What Could Make Cyber Criminals Target Your Organisation

First off, it’s important to understand that how cyber threats happen is different from one organisation to another. For instance, organisations that have payment details listed on their websites are vulnerable to DDoS attacks. Identifying the type of cyber threat your organization is vulnerable to can help you create training programmes that can help to address those attacks instead of using a generalised training program.

Refrain From Punishing Employees Who Make Mistakes During Training

During cyber security awareness training, you should expect employees to make a lot of mistakes. It is through failing or making mistakes that employees can perform well in the training. When employees make mistakes, have an in-person conversation with them to let them know about it and how they should avoid making them in the future. You can also retrain them again to see whether they have learned something or not.

Training Should Involve All Employees at Every Level of the Organisation

When a threat happens, it affects every department in an organization. Besides, a mistake made by one employee that could make cyber criminals infiltrate the organisation’s defence system could affect every other employee of the organisation. For that reason, all employees of an organisation should receive cyber security awareness training.

Complement Staff Cybersecurity Awareness Training

The training you conduct can be effective or not depending on how you conduct it. Remember that different people have different levels of understanding when it comes to training. For that reason, you should consider complementing awareness training to boost their understanding of cyber security. For instance, in addition to training courses, you could place posters around their offices, etc.

In addition to security tools and defence systems, cyber security awareness training can help to empower employees to act more securely. But that can only happen if IT professionals use the best security awareness training practices. 

Charlie Svensson is an IT specialist and consultant who writes for  BestEssay.

You Might Also Read: 

Cyber Security Training Reduces Cyber Attacks: