Cybersecurity Awareness Training for Employees Provides an Undeniable Return on Investment
Cybersecurity threats are top of mind these days, more than ever. In fact, cybercrime is projected to result in costs of up to $6 trillion by 2021. Cybersecurity Awareness Training for Employees is a great way to combat this ever-growing problem.
With the prevalence of cybersecurity threats, employees need to constantly be on guard. However, employees can be the weakest link in a company’s cybersecurity defense. For this reason, cybersecurity awareness training is critical for any organization’s employees.
Training Criteria
Your employees will need to be trained according to a few different criteria. They will need to be trained to be able to effectively identify and prevent possible cybersecurity attacks. These attacks may come in various forms such as through spam, malware, social engineering, or phishing. Identifying any signs of such attacks should be stressed and employees should be instructed to report these signs to their organization’s security team, management IT consultants.
Strong passwords shouldn’t be forgotten either. Remind your employees to use passwords that combine a variety of different characters. They should also make use of multifactor authentication wherever possible.
Training Tools
Having the right training tools is important for ensuring that your employees have the right knowledge to protect themselves and your company from cybersecurity threats. One of the most complete security awareness training programs out there is KnowBe4’s Security Awareness Training Program. This program draws from the knowledge of Kevin Mitnick, a maverick hacker turned security consultant, to offer a concrete training program for employees.
The security awareness training program gives your organization access to over 1000 training items. It allows you to run simulated phishing campaigns so that you can see where the weaknesses are in your organization. You can tailor phishing campaigns based on the behavior of your employees. Based on the results of these campaigns, you can then create remedial training to make sure that they learn from their mistakes. The training program allows you to monitor your company’s progress over time as well. On average, it has been seen that the number of employees who fall for phishing schemes drops from 37.9% of the workforce to just 4.7% 12 months later.
Besides the ability to run simulated training campaigns, the training program also offers unlimited access to a large library of training material. For example, your employees will have access to unique job-aids such as the Social Engineering Red Flags program which alerts them to 22 things that they should watch out for in emails and 20 ways to block mobile attacks. Employees are also trained to understand how things like spam, phishing, social engineering, spear-phishing, and malware work. This knowledge helps them to be better prepared to face these threats if exposed to them on the job.
Wrapping Up
Ensuring that your employees have the necessary tools they need to protect themselves and your business from cybersecurity attacks is of paramount importance. Cybersecurity awareness training is a must since in many cases employees are the weak link in your cybersecurity defense chain. Tricks like social engineering and phishing can play on human emotions and can lead to mistakes happening. That’s why this type of training is important. To be aware is to be prepared and solutions like Knowbe4’s Security Awareness Training Program will soundly train your employees in security best practices.
Daniel J. Haurey is a Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT) and founding member at Partners in Regulatory Compliance, a cybersecurity consulting company in Manhattan, NY.
