Cybersecurity awareness should be at the forefront of every business’s priority list. Whether you find yourself running a local burger joint or a Fortune 500 corporation, cybersecurity threats lurk behind every digital corner, waiting to strike. If you and your staff aren’t fully prepared to prevent and defend against cybercriminals and other security threats, they can and will cause disruptive, sometimes irreparable, damage to your business and daily operations.
Today, we’ll go over the critical importance of cybersecurity awareness training, we’ll also explore current cybersecurity stats and how you train your office employees in basic cybersecurity best practices.
A Rise in Cybersecurity Threats And A Lack of Preparedness
It’s simple to forget about cybersecurity awareness. With the daily hustle and bustle, especially for small and medium-sized businesses in the Greater Boston area, cybersecurity can easily fall to the wayside.
We understand why this is true, however, it’s absolutely critical that you prioritize cybersecurity within your company as it can effectively protect you from cyber threats and put you ahead of the competition. Many companies across the globe are severely lacking in their security best practices and the consequences could be dire.
For example, according to a report by Yahoo.com, “78% of senior IT and IT security leaders believe their organizations lack sufficient protection against cyberattacks despite increased IT security investments.” And, according to a 2019 Global Data Risk Report by Varonis, “on average, only 5% of companies’ folders are properly protected.”
These are just a few numbers representing the dire importance of cybersecurity awareness and basic digital security best practice training.
Top 8 Cybersecurity Risks and Trends In 2021 (So Far)
While we’ll go over basic cybersecurity awareness training in this blog, Global research and advisory company, Gartner, recently released their list of top cybersecurity risks and trends in 2021. This list will keep you in the know about what trends you should be following:
- Cybersecurity Mesh
- Cyber-Savvy Boards
- Vendor Consolidation
- Identity-First Security
- Managing Machine Identities Becoming A Critical Security Capability
- Remote Work Becoming Normal Work
- Breach and Attack Simulations
- Privacy
5 Cybersecurity Awareness Practices That You Can Enact Today
1. Scam & Malicious Email Awareness
Every employee within your organization, from office managers to team leaders to executive CEOs, should be aware and vigilant of phishing scams and other malicious attacks via email. According to Security Boulevard, “95% of all attacks targeting enterprise networks are caused by successful spear phishing,” and that “85% of all organizations have been hit by phishing attacks at least once,” and yet only “3% of users report phishing attacks to management.”
While scam, phishing, ransomware, etc., emails can be challenging to spot for an untrained eye, providing your employees with general cybersecurity awareness training regarding malicious email attempts can make these threats simple to identify and prevent.
2. Regularly Change Your Passwords
An oldie, but a goodie. Regularly updating your passwords is still one of the most effective ways to prevent the most common data breaches. Another trouble report by Security Boulevard explains that “a Google survey found that 65% of people reuse passwords across multiple, if not all sites,” and that hacked passwords are responsible for “81% of hacking-related breaches.”
It’s critical that your employees and organization as a whole regularly update and change their passwords on a consistent basis. You should also make sure that your passwords are complex and difficult to guess (so, no, your dog or cat’s name and birthday does not work).
3. Multi-Factor Authentication
Two- or Multi-factor authentication practices are one the best, most straightforward ways to prevent security breaches within your company’s critical and private accounts. By simply enforcing 2F or MF authentication within your company’s accounts, you can effectively prevent most automated cyberattacks. In fact, according to a report by Microsoft, multi-factor authentication “blocks 99.9% of automated attacks.”
By taking the time to educate yourself and your team on the “How-To”s and benefits of multi-factor authentication and implementing diligently, you’ll effectively protect your business from most cyber attacks.
4. Remote Employee Security
As many companies permanently switch to either fully-remote or hybrid working setups, this trend brings along new cybersecurity threats of its own without the proper digital preparation. In fact, according to a report by Forbes, “more than 40% of businesses had at least one cyberattack related to the pandemic in 2020.”
Providing your remote employees with up-to-date cybersecurity awareness training regularly, especially regarding their remote or personal work devices, such as computers, laptops, and mobile, can effectively protect your most valuable assets from data breaches, even while miles away.
5. Make Cybersecurity Training A Routine
The truth of the matter is that cybersecurity training, education, and general awareness needs to be more than a “should” within your company; it’s an absolute necessity. Similar to the cyber threats and attacks that we fight daily, your cybersecurity practices need to grow and evolve continuously, adapting beyond the reach of the cyber criminals that seek to infiltrate, steal, attack, and ransom your company’s most precious pieces of data and accounts.
By making cybersecurity awareness and best practices a part of your daily operations, you’ll effectively increase the digital security know-how of your team and overall company. This offers up-to-date data protection, keeping your secured files and accounts safe from cybercriminals. As a business leader, this also affords you peace of mind, protecting your company’s reputation and, ultimately, finances.
Need Help Training? Enlist A Professional IT Consultant
There are many more cybersecurity practices that you can undertake to further protect your company from digital threats and attacks. Depending on the size of your organization and the industry you perform business in, you will want to brainstorm the most prominent threats and the amount of time, budget, and resources at your disposal to strengthen cybersecurity best practices.
If you require assistance performing critical employee security training or implementing basic-to-advanced cybersecurity practices, a qualified cybersecurity-trained IT professional can help. Together, we’ll work to set up the best necessary practices available on your organization’s budget and assist with training your employees, whether remote or in-office.
Categorised in: cybersecurity, Security, training, updates, virus