According to an article by Security Boulevard, 98% of all cyber attacks rely on social engineering. Another article by CISO Mag mentions that 88% of all security breaches occur due to human error!
These statistics alone are sufficient for proving the importance of providing employees with cyber security awareness training. With cyber crime rising at an unprecedented rate, conducting security awareness training is one of the most important steps you can take to keep your organization safe.
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What is the Main Purpose of Security Awareness Training?
Your employees serve as the weakest link in your organization’s security chain. As cyber criminals are always looking for the weak spots in your organization’s infrastructure, overlooking the vulnerability level of employees is the gravest mistake you can make. The only way to avoid cyber attacks caused by human error is to build a cyber resilient work culture, where each of your employees understand the importance and benefits of staying cyber vigilant. However, it is not easy to achieve a cyber resilient work culture.
Read more about Workplace Security Policy: Need of the Hour
Security awareness training equips your employees with the knowledge they need to detect and avoid cyber attack attempts on themselves or the organization. Conducting this training makes your employees aware of what these attacks look like, how dangerous they can be and what is the best way to respond to them. If you manage to make all of your employees vigilant enough, they will serve as a strong last line of defense against cyber attacks, keeping your organization out of harm’s way.
Read more about Benefits and Purpose of Security Awareness Training
Why is Security Awareness Training Important?
Most businesses believe that if they have an efficient IT team, giving cyber security awareness training to non-technical employees is just a waste of resources.
Well, in that case, we ask you to rethink and here is why!
Consider this. What would happen if your non-technical employees received fraudulent emails with a malicious attachment posing as the details of their holiday bonus?
Of course, they would open it. Who wouldn’t want to take a look at their holiday bonus, right?
Well, a cyber resilient employee wouldn’t!
They would be aware enough to double check the sender’s ID and recognize the markers of a phishing email.
This is why all of your employees need security awareness training, no matter what their designation or job description is. Here is a list of some of the major benefits of security awareness training for employees.
#1 Mitigation of Cyber Risks
When your employees have been trained in the basics of cyber security, they understand the importance of following the information security best practices. Whether they are working from home or office, they will know how to minimize the risk of cyber attacks by strictly adhering to the security protocol put in place by the IT team. Since they will be capable of recognizing and avoiding common social engineering attacks, the cyber risks will significantly decline.
#2 Reduced Risk of Financial Losses
With the risk of cyber attacks reduced due to cyber security awareness training, your organization can avoid significant financial losses caused by cyber attacks. These financial losses include the loss of business, IT remediation cost and the fee of legal battles. Cyber attacks can also make your customers and partners distrust you. Avoiding cyber attacks with the help of security awareness training helps in preserving your relationship with the customers, ensuring smooth business flow.
#3 Cyber Security Compliance
For security reasons, the number of regulations that the businesses have to comply with has increased considerably over the last decade. If your organization holds, processes or transmits sensitive, personal or classified data, you need to make sure that you are strictly complying with regulations put in place. In case you fail to do so, you can be subjected to huge fines and lawsuits. Not only is having a security awareness programme in place one of the regulations set by several institutions but it can also educate your employees in the correct way of handling sensitive data, enforcing your cyber security compliance efforts.
What Should Security Awareness Training Include?
There are different kinds of security awareness training programmes from hours-long seminars to interactive quizzes. However, one thing that is common in them all is that they aim to equip your employees with the necessary knowledge about various prevalent and emerging cyber attack vectors. It is essential to make sure that you pick a programme that does not bore the users or overwhelm them with too much information at once.
Providing your employees with an interactive and engaging security awareness training session is the only way to make sure that they will retain all the information and apply it in real life. For this reason, cyber attack simulation is considered one of the most effective ways of training your employees in the basics of cyber security. It allows you to test your employees’ responses to cyber attacks and assess your organization’s threat posture.
Implementing a cyber attack simulation tool like TSAT can help you launch dummy cyber attack campaigns on your employees, giving them first-hand experience in dealing with a cyber attack attempt .The simulation campaigns launched by Threatcop are also followed by engaging cyber security awareness training sessions and interactive assessments, making it the most comprehensive security awareness training tool.
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In a Nutshell
No organization is safe against prevalent and emerging cyber threats. So, it is essential to make sure that your employees are ready to respond when they inevitably face a cyber attack attempt. In order to keep your organization protected, conduct effective cyber security training for all the members of your organization.
Originally published at https://threatcop.ai on September 28, 2021.
