Cyber Security Awareness Training For Management & Employees

Cyber Security Awareness Training For Management & Employees

Directors Report: This Premium article is temporarily free to view. For unrestricted website access please Subscribe: £5 monthly / £50 annual.

As more and more data breaches and hacks make the news it’s vital that you take the time now to look at where your organisation is vulnerable. 2023 is fast approaching. As the pandemic is very slowly becoming a distant memory, the digital acceleration that came with it has continued in both our working and personal lives. 

Hybrid working remains commonplace in many organisations, and without an integrated and powerful online safety awareness programme in place it is only a matter of time before your organisation will be hit with a cyber-attack. And data breaches, phishing attacks, scams and ransomware attacks are on the increase. And it only takes one employee to be tricked into clicking onto a malicious link for it to impact the entire organisation very quickly. 

As businesses face unprecedented economic pressures, a cyber attack is the last thing any serious organisation wants to be facing. 

While you can set up any manner of systems to protect your business with cyber security, the truth is that many attacks target you where you’re most vulnerable: your employees and training them is very important. 

Cyber security training for staff and management is incredibly important and GoCyber, an excellent training company, is focused on delivering an impact quickly. 

This action based learning gives your entire workforce excellent and effective online safety training in just a week. 
Seven steps that take 5-10 minutes each to complete - combining social learning and interaction, gamification, actions and engaging videos to get employees to think differently and ensure you minimise the risk of a cyber-attack.

1. First, Don’t Blame Your Employees

Many people look at the news of a massive data breach and conclude that it’s all the fault of some hapless employee that clicked on the wrong thing. While it’s true that they may have been the one to fall for the trap, blaming an individual for not having the right knowledge at the right time is really a way of avoiding the organisation’s responsibility to ensure its employees keep its network and data secure.

The onus is on the organisation to come up with a plan for ensuring everyone has the knowledge they need to make the right decision and knows where to go if they have any questions. That means being clear about what to do if anybody has questions and setting up the infrastructure necessary to share emerging threats and getting  everyone invested in organisational security.

2. Invest in Employee Training

One of the most important concepts to grasp with cybersecurity is that maintenance is a constant job. New attacks develop monthly, if not daily, and your approach to guarding against them can’t be limited to annual training.
If you only updated your network devices once a year, your security would be a nightmare. The same is true for your people.

You need to commit to a wide variety of approaches to keep your team abreast of what’s out there and what to do about it. 

This requires a mindset shift: not viewing the person who opened the wrong attachment as the point of failure and, instead, recognising that it’s the security and training structure around that individual which has failed.

3. Make Cyber Security Awareness a Priority

Even if you know which way the trends have been pointing, it’s hard to get your head around just how regularly data breaches occur. Even more shocking is realising how little coverage most of these attacks have gotten in the media. 

One way to get the message across to your team is to share cyber security news regularly. The volume and frequency of attacks will certainly get the message across that everyone needs to be thinking about security in their day-to-day.

At the same time, you don’t want to flood inboxes so much that your emails head straight to the archives. Instead, think about appending a “cyber security in the news” section to emails or reports that you already make or simply including a few links in your signature that you can continually update.

4. Get Buy-In From the C-Suite

In an organisation, change needs to happen from the top. Just like with any digital transformation project, if you don’t find a champion who is invested in the value of what you’re trying to do, it’s going to be an uphill battle to justify the man-hours and expenses necessary to implement a solid cyber security plan.

When making a case for investing in regular training for your employees, you need to speak to executives in terms they can understand. 

The average cost of a data breach in 2022 is £3,93m and is still rising and data breaches are a common occurrence. There is no shortage of news articles covering the damage to organisations big and small. It’s the price we pay for all the incredible things that technology and the cloud have made possible.

If you’re looking for executive buy-in, it helps to be incredibly clear about how data breaches and other cyber attacks can affect the bottom line. The costs are more wide-ranging than most people think, and it’s helpful to use some numbers to make things more tangible.

5. Password Security Training and Best Practices

We all know that following password best practices is a fundamental building block of a solid organisational security plan. 

The challenge is getting your team to actually do it. To review, a strong password has these traits:

• It’s long enough: Longer passwords are exponentially harder to brute-force. Make sure you require at least eight characters for every password you use.

• It uses multiple character sets: Each character set you use (uppercase, lowercase, numerals, symbols) adds another layer of complexity that makes it harder to crack.

• It doesn’t use complete words: While a common word might be easy to remember, it’s incredibly easy for an attacker to add a dictionary attack to their password cracker script.

• It’s changed regularly: Using the same password over and over again means there’s more of a chance for it to be compromised. Setting a reminder to change it means there’s a smaller window of opportunity if it does get compromised.

• It’s not shared across accounts: A quick trip to com can tell you whether or not a password attached to your email has been published on the darknet, where an enterprising hacker can harvest that information and try it on other websites.

The best approach to ensure compliance is to remove the friction for your team and hopefully solve other problems they may run into in their day-to-day workflow. We recommend adopting a password management application tool, of which many are available.

These tools will generate and remember strong passwords for every account your employees use. They also make it easy to share passwords across your team, allowing you to collaborate remotely while still following best practices.

6. Train Employees to Recognise Phishing & Social Engineering Attacks

Most effective cyber-attacks rely on human error. Attackers can spoof email addresses, domains, and even the most protected accounts. Throw in some fake corporate branding and you have a recipe for disaster.
Here, again, we see the importance of not blaming an individual employee for something that your business needs to solve - as an organisation. 

Hackers cast a lot of lines to see where they can get a nibble, but a sophisticated attacker with the right information can create a highly-targeted scheme to work their way into your network. 

You need to teach your employees how to identify a “phishy” looking email and where to go if they have questions. Here are some recommendations:

• Check the sender email address and name for spoofing, especially when the sender is making an unusual or unexpected request.

• Check the email format and ask yourself if there’s anything off about it.

• Make a phone call if you’re suddenly asked for key information like login credentials.

• Hover over links to make sure they go where they say they go.

• Scan any attachment before opening it, and check the file extension for anything unusual, like multiple file types.

Social engineering attacks are even more nefarious because they target your employees’ need to help people. An attacker will call or email your organisation, posing as a vendor and asking for help. Again, common sense rules apply here. How has this person proven they are who they say they are? Why are they requesting this information?

Teaching employees to take a step back and think things through is critical to avoid falling prey to this kind of attack.

7. Make Cyber Security a Part of Onboarding

First impressions are everything, and cybersecurity is no exception. If organisational security isn’t a part of your onboarding, it’s time to start incorporating it into your training process from the start. Password security, phishing, and social engineering attacks, all of it needs to be covered from day one. Most critically, make sure you’re not just going over the rules but also explaining why these best practices are so important.

Just like with getting executive buy-in, it’s important to be clear about just how much of a threat data breaches are and why it’s their problem, too. 

Creating clear employee cyber security guidelines can be a major asset here, as it gives them a resource to turn to if they need help. 

Remember that it’s better to know about a potential breach as soon as it happens, so make sure you’re creating an environment where sharing is encouraged and avoiding a situation where someone tries to cover up their mistakes and makes a risky situation even worse.

8. Conduct “Live Fire” Practice Attacks

You’d never train an employee for a new piece of software without giving them a chance to experiment in a realistic environment where they can put their newly-acquired skills into practice. On the same note, you can’t expect your team to build the correct cyber security habits without finding a way for them to put these concepts into action and even learn from their mistakes.

Whether you use an outside vendor or run it through your own security department, it’s well worth the investment to test your organisation with a “live fire” simulation. 

Your team may understand the principles of recognising a phishing or social engineering attack, but the key is to run those mental checks in the course of a busy workday where you have a million other concerns. Just like a fire drill, running regular (practice) attacks will help your employees learn from your mistakes. You’ll also get data as to where in your organisation there’s the most room for improvement, helping you plan future training sessions as necessary. 

We all hate falling for the same trick twice, so a successful practice attack can make for a real teachable moment about why security is so important.

What You Can Do Right Now

As the number of data breaches and hacks continue to rise, it’s vital for your business to take steps to ensure you don’t find yourself in the headlines. Just like with any organisational transformation project, which means getting your team to buy in and build habits.

Training is the key here, as well as constant reminders that there are threats out there and maybe even a “live fire” exercise to show how easily you can fall victim to an attack. Remember that cybersecurity is a team effort, and you need to put your employees in a position to succeed.

Frequently Asked Questions - How to Train Employee for Cyber Security  

1.  How Important is Cyber Security Training
Training is everything when it comes to cyber security. New attacks are constantly cropping up, and you need to put your employees in a position to succeed. They need to be in the habit of thinking critically any time they’re asked to share login information.

2. How often should I train employees on cyber security?
You should train employees once a quarter or more, with intermittent “live fire” training exercises and constant reminders about new attacks that have developed and breaches that occur. 
You might also like to consider repetitive bite-sized options that help instill behaviour change by keeping online safety top of mind and GoCyber can help with this.

3. What should I include in cyber security training?
Cyber security training needs to include how to recognise phishing and social engineering attacks, password best practices, and the potential cost of a data breach to your business.

4. What is a cyber security employee policy?
A cyber security employee policy is the central resource employees can go to if they have any questions about cybersecurity. It includes anything addressed in training, as well as organisational policies and best practices.

An Excellent Set of Cyber Security Training Courses

Employee cyber security courses delivered by GoCyber  provide important employee training on the essential principles, policies and practices that organisations use to protect and secure personal, proprietary or confidential data. In today's business world, information is increasingly digital, making it easy to misuse. 

Organisations are struggling to protect their confidential information and to keep pace with the increasingly stringent laws that protect consumer and employee privacy, and information security compliance is becoming therefore becoming more difficult. 

An organisation that experiences an information security breach suffers significant negative consequences. For example, customers and regulators may lose trust in its reliability, its reputation may suffer, and it may incur financial losses due to the cost of enhancing its information and cyber security capabilities.

Key risk factors for information security breaches are: 

• Insiders leaking information, either on purpose or accidentally.

• Outsiders intruding on the organisation's systems. This makes Internet security and information security training crucial to a culture of compliance.

Although hackers frequently make the headlines, ordinary breaches of information security often start with things such as an intruder in the workspace, an unscrupulous co-worker or a stolen laptop. 

Preventing grave damage to an organisation's financial status and reputation requires employees to be vigilant against both internal and external risks.

With respect to external risks, organisations around the globe are seeing an uptick in cyber-crime, as criminals use computers to exploit the speed and anonymity of the Internet. In fact, cyber-crime has been ranked as one of the top four economic crimes. Cyber attacks via botnets, malware, and network intrusion have targeted computer hardware and software. Employees must take care in their electronic communication to minimise risk.
Information security compliance laws demand that employees take specific precautions with certain types of personal information they handle. 

But even organisations that are not subject to these laws must be sure that their employees understand and follow internal policies for protecting proprietary and/or confidential data in all forms. 

For more Information please contact:  GoCyber

References

Thomson Reuters:         CoxBLUE:         Upguard:

You Might Also Read: 

Ensure Your Organisation’s Staff Has Cyber Security Awareness For 2023: