Your Biggest Cyber Security Risk: Your Employees

Cyber criminals work round the clock to detect and exploit vulnerabilities in your business’s network, exposing and selling sensitive data on the Dark Web for shameful gains. Deploying a robust cyber security posture that’s built using comprehensive security solutions will help to counter these hackers. However, while you’re caught up doing this, there is a possibility you may overlook mitigating the weakest link in your fight against cyber criminals — your employees.

With remote working looking set to stay and decentralised workspaces becoming the new , businesses like yours must strengthen their cyber security strategies to counter human errors and data breaches carried out by malicious insiders.

All employees, irrespective of their designation or rank, can expose your business vulnerabilities to cyber criminals.

Implementing routine security awareness training for employees can help you prevent a vulnerability from escalating into a disaster. As the first line of defence against cyber attacks, your employees must be thoroughly and regularly trained to identify and deflate potential cyber threats.

Why do Employees Pose a Risk to Businesses?

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

  1. Falling for phishing scams: With the onset of COVID-19, hackers masquerading as the World Health Organization (WHO) tricked people into clicking on malicious links and sharing sensitive information. Cyber criminals are using improved techniques, like spoofed emails and text messages, to propagate the ongoing scam. Your employees must be well-trained to counter it.

  2. Bad password hygiene: A section of your employees might reuse the same password or a set of passwords for multiple accounts (business and personal), which is a dangerous habit that allows cyber criminals to crack your business’s network security.

  3. Miss-delivery: 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. Inept 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’s IT security left unaddressed.

The bottom line is that, with cyber criminals upgrading their arsenal every day and exploring a plethora of options to trap your employees, security awareness training has become more important than ever before.

Security Awareness Training: An Essential Investment

A one-time training program will neither help your employees repel cyber threats nor help your business develop a security culture. To deal with the growing threat landscape, your employees need thorough and regular security awareness training.

You must never back out of providing continual security awareness training to your employees just because of the time and money you need to invest in it. The return on investment will be visible in the form of better decision-making employees who efficiently respond in the face of adversity, ultimately saving your business from data breaches, damage to reputation and potentially saving on legal costs.

The following statistics highlight just a few reasons why you must deploy regular security awareness training and consider it a necessary investment:

You can’t expect your employees to train themselves on how to detect and respond to cyber threats. It is your responsibility to provide regular training to your employees to ensure you adequately prepare them to identify and ward off potential cyber attacks.

Every employee must realise that even a minor mistake can snowball into a terrible security disaster for the company. They need to understand that your business’s cyber security is also their responsibility.

You can transform your business’s biggest cyber security risk – your employees – into its prime defence against threats by developing a security culture.

Making all this happen will require continued effort and may seem like an uphill climb, but with the right partner by your side, you can easily integrate security awareness training into your business’s cyber security strategy.

Why not take that first step towards training and empowering your employees by talking to Quintech? Our cyber security experts can help you create and manage a robust cyber security strategy tailored to your business to mitigate risk and ensure business continuity. Feel free to get in touch anytime on info@quintech.co.uk or 01684 882700.