Many of even the most severe security breaches could have been prevented if employees were properly trained and educated.
“A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link”
This quote rings alarmingly true for those of us in cyber security. One employee who is unaware of security consequences could jeopardize an entire business/organization.
Train your employees from Day 1
If you are leading your IT department, you need to make sure that you have time dedicated towards IT On-boarding for every new employee. This time should be used to go through the rules of using company hardware and software and most importantly, how to handle company data. This should be a meticulous process because each employee that doesn’t understand the security rules and guidelines to an organization is an unnecessary threat.
Continue to educate and promote security awareness
After each employee is aware of the security rules/guidelines and why they’re important, IT department leaders should be continuing to educate the rest of the organization. If there is a new vulnerability discovered on software used internally, this needs to be brought to the attention of the rest of the company so steps can be made to mitigate the risk.
Employees should also be kept up to date with the latest phishing scams in the email inbox. A short email regularly sent out to all employees can be a great way to keep everyone up-to-date in the latest threats while also addressing regular security concerns, while not overwhelming your employees with information. There are also very useful services that will attempt to phish your organization for you so that IT departments can be aware of their uninformed users.
Be Available
If employees have questions about security guidelines or threats they may be dealing with, make sure they have someone to talk to about it. If an uneducated employee goes and tries fixing a security issue themselves, most likely the issue will get worse.
InfoSec-Simplified 