A Business’ Biggest Cybersecurity Risk are Your Employees

Most company leaders are aware that Cybercriminals work round the clock to detect and exploit vulnerabilities in your business’ network for nefarious gains. The only way to counter these hackers is by implementing a robust cybersecurity infrastructure that is built using comprehensive security solutions. However, while you are caught up doing this, there is a possibility you may overlook mitigating the weakest link in your fight against cybercriminals — your employees.

With remote work increasing in popularity and decentralized workspaces becoming the new norm, businesses like yours must strengthen their cybersecurity strategies to counter human errors and data breaches perpetrated by malicious insiders. All employees, irrespective of their designation and/or rank, can expose your business vulnerabilities to cybercriminals.

Implementing routine security awareness training and testing for employees can help you prevent a vulnerability from escalating into a disaster. As the first line of defense against cyberattacks, your employees must be thoroughly and regularly trained to identify and defuse potential cyberthreats.

What Cybersecurity Risks do Employees Pose?

According to an IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report from 2020, 23 percent of data breaches in an organization occurred because of human error. An untrained employee can compromise your business’ security in multiple ways. Some of the most common errors committed by employees include:

1. Falling for phishing scams: At the beginning of COVID-19, hackers masquerading as the World Health Organization (WHO) tricked people into clicking on malicious links and sharing sensitive information. Cybercriminals are continually using improved techniques, like spoofed emails and text messages, to propagate the ongoing scam. Your employees must be well-trained to counter it.
2. Inferior password protocol: A section of your employees might reuse the same password or a set of passwords for multiple accounts (business and personal).  Also, not having employees change passwords on a frequent basis, every 90 days,  is a dangerous habit that allows cybercriminals to crack your business’ network security.
3. Incorrect delivery of Email: 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.
4. Incompetent 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 left unaddressed.

The bottom line is that with cybercriminals upgrading and changing their strategies every day while exploring an overabundance of options to trap your employees, security awareness training has become more important than ever before.

Security Awareness Training and Ongoing Testing is Critical

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

You should never cease providing continual security awareness training to your employees just because of the time and money. The return on investment will be noticeable in the form of better decision-making by employees to effectively respond to attempted security threats, saving your business from data breaches, damage to reputation and potentially expensive lawsuits. The following statistics highlight why you must 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 is not the best way to manage an ever-evolving threat landscape. You must accept the responsibility of providing regular training and testing to your employees to ensure they are prepared 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. Employees need to understand that your business’ cybersecurity is also their responsibility.

You can change your business’ biggest cybersecurity risk – your employees – into its primary defense against threats by implementing a security culture that emphasizes adequate and regular security awareness training and testing.

Making all this happen will require continual effort and may seem insurmountable, but with the right partner by your side, you can easily integrate security awareness training into your business’ cybersecurity approach. The first step towards training and empowering your employees begins with an email to us. Feel free to contact us anytime.

Sources:

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