The weakest link in the chain of a resilient and secure IT system is your employees. In this article, we will be looking at why this is and how to ensure your staff are aware of today’s cyber threats. What’s more, we will give you some advise on how to fix this problem and make your business mroe resilient.
Why Your Staff May Be The Weakest Link?
This comes down to your staff’s risk score and awareness of cyber threats. You can invest thousands of pounds in implementing IT security systems in order to keep your business secure. However, no single system is 100% secure, and this leaves some risk. Today, the most common vulnerability is incoming email and how your staff interacts to email phishing attacks.
Email phishing comes in many forms. While some staff might be aware of what to look for, not all will. Can you confidently say that all your employees who have access to company emails are 100% aware of the possibility of threats and security breaches? Do they know how to spot a phishing email when they come across one?
How To Fix It:
There are, of course, some simple steps to be 100% confident and reduce your businesses risk score in this area. Firstly, you should run regular cyber security awareness sessions. Cyber security awareness sessions involve getting the staff and IT team together to learn about possible cyber threats. Running these regularly, for example, every quarter is advise-able.
The other course of action is running simulated email phishing attacks. There are off the shelf solutions that will test the awareness of the workforce to email phishing by running a simulated phishing attack. The advantage of this is that you can profile each employee’s risk score. Follow this up by issuing the correct level of cyber awareness training.
Other types of simulated attack include USB key drops, where a USB thumb drive is intentionally left somewhere with sensitive-looking files within. The simulated test is then run to record if the files are accessed. While most users are now aware of the risks that USB drives can pose, this is an excellent simulation to run to spot any weaknesses again.
If you would like to learn more about how we can help your business become more cyber aware please get in touch with us our contact page here.
Aberdeen Cyber Security – We understand cyber, it’s in our name.