Strengthening Your Human Firewall
Every organization needs to educate their employees about cybersecurity to help protect data and systems. It is important that employees understand and are aware of everyday situations that could actually cause damage to the company if they are not careful.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to train employees in cyber security awareness. The wrong way approaches training as a once-a-year or semi-annual exercise in which employees are gathered in the break room with snacks and subjected to a long, or sometimes too-brief, PowerPoint presentation. This method treats employees as a passive audience and inadequately engages them. Done wrong, security training feels more like punishment than an opportunity to teach and inspire employees to be active contributors to their organization’s safety and well-being.
The wrong way also reflects a one-size-fits-all organizational mindset, which fails to take into account that people have various strengths and abilities and respond differently to a range of methods by which training material is presented. They also have varying security awareness needs depending on their role and level of access to sensitive information within their organization.
Another key flaw of the breakroom approach is that the impact of training gets measured in terms of attendance instead of content retention and behaviour modification
Creating and delivering a comprehensive cybersecurity awareness campaign
Too many times a cybersecurity program is rendered useless because it fails to connect to the people.
When it’s done properly, security awareness training
Cybersecurity awareness should also be managed like a marketing campaign that aims to persuade users to take action in an engaging and systematic process.
The following steps will provide a solid foundation:
1. Set goals
The first step is to determine what you want to achieve and define the scope of your cybersecurity awareness campaign based on the specific needs of your organization. These goals should be defined in a plan that you can implement and measure.
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2. Ensure to have buy-in from management
It’s critical to have an agreement about the importance of cybersecurity from the top down to every level of management within the organization so that you can influence attitudes and behaviours appropriately.
3. Choose different cyber security awareness topics
Having an ongoing cybersecurity awareness campaign means that you can continuously deliver information to employees about different cybersecurity issues. For example one month you may do a topic on password robustness; the next it may be about phishing.
Best practice in internal communications includes using different delivery channels (intranet web pages, videos, quiz, gaming, newsletters, e-learning,...) to communicate the same message. This is based on research that shows that you often need to deliver the same information several times before it resonates and sticks with employees. It also reflects that different people have different preferences and styles when it comes to receiving information.
5. Include cyber security in employee onboarding
Cybersecurity awareness needs to begin from the very first day an employee begins with your organization. By including it in your employee onboarding process
Many IT pros don’t know where to start when it comes to creating a security awareness program that will work for their organisation. Digisoter has taken away all the guesswork with our Cyber Security Awareness Training as a Service.
We have partnered with KnowBe4 to provide you with a platform to better manage the urgent IT security problems of social engineering, spear phishing and ransomware attacks. KnowBe4 is the world’s largest Security Awareness Training and Simulated Phishing platform with over tens of thousands of customers. DigiSôter provides it as a service, which is operated and managed offsite and delivered as a cloud-based service.