As an organization there is already a lot on your plate, you have to protect your entire data network from the reach of illicit hackers, maintain a steady stream of financials to upgrade your infrastructure, and you have to train your non-IT staff as well against the havocs of cyber breached. Yes, you heard it right, you are responsible for the effective training of your non-IT staff because they don’t have a lot of interaction with security metrics of the organization.
You must tackle a cyber breach as effectively as you can and more hands-on-deck the better it is going to be, however even after you have made sure that your security systems are up to date and non-penetrable, hackers would find their way around it. That is not a threat as much as it is a fact, the scales are shifting more rapidly and on un-supervised terms as never before. It seems that the hackers today can put even a small vulnerability in your data infrastructure and use it to their advantage, including multiple cases of phishing and social engineering.
That is why you must give proper insight towards your employees going through courses and earning the best cybersecurity certifications to become an irreplaceable asset to your company. Here are some of the best practices you can take into account considering the effective training of the masses;
1. Never blame your employees
Whenever a company encounters a cyber breach, and the incident hit the news, it is assumed that a particular employee was, in fact, responsible for clicking over compromised files or links. While it is true to some extent that the employees being incapable of the standard knowledge fell victim to the trap, but you can't put the complete blame over them for not having considerate knowledge on the subject. It is another way of shifting the spotlight away from the organizational responsibilities of the company to conduct effective training of the employees.
As the management capacity of an organization, you must ensure that every worker at your company has been given the proper training considering the cybersecurity, and they are aligned with the security standards and to be able to follow them upbeat. Putting up an infrastructure for this purpose will ensure that there is an organizational body that will fill in the workers about any questions or queries about the cyber training and also conducts informational sessions on newly emerging cyber threats and how to contain them.
2. Invest in consistent employee training
Cyber anomalies happen over a monthly rate if they are not happening daily, every time there is the talk of a new type of attack being used by the hackers to cripple the security systems of a company and gain access. Little do your non-IT staff knows about such attacks because they are not trained as much as the consistency of a new cyberattack occurring shortly. If you are one of the organizations that only update their security systems once a year and like to conduct awareness sessions after a considerate amount of time then you are doomed on two fronts; first at your physical cybersecurity and secondly incompatible employees who don't even have an idea what they are dealing with once a cyberattack occurs.
This needs to stop at once; you need to layout a proper plot for the effective troubling of your employees because they are your biggest assets. In the event of a cyberattack, they will prove more effective than the security parameters you have installed after surfing a ton of money on them.
3. Training regarding password security and related practices
Having a strong password generation and credential management system is one thing, but getting your non-IT staff to follow the same regulations as the cybersecurity staff is another. Try feeding the following information regarding password security to your employees in the context of a training session, that way they would be able to absorb a little more than being taught verbally;
- It is standard procedure that any password or credential should be at least eight characters long, but get them to appreciate the value of even longer password because they are extremely difficult to crack or brute-force.
- It should be a mix of different characters, such as should contain the uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols as well. The more complex, the more difficult it would be to crack.
- Get it scanned and confirmed that it would not fall victim to the dictionary attack, so the password should never contain complete phrases or words.
- It should be changed more frequently to keep the hackers in a constant loop
- It should not be made accessible or being shared with other sources over the internet, this only compromises the integrity of password security and make it easy for hackers to crack it
4. Training for spectating phishing or social engineering attack
Effective training of the employees regarding phishing and social engineering attack should be conducted because these can’t be interpreted via a computer and strongly relies on “human error.” Following steps can be taught to your non-IT staff to recognize the integrity of an email;
- Checking the sender email address to label the email as spoofed or phished especially when the request being made is susceptible as unusual
- Checking the format/layout of the email
- Contacting the sender via personal mobile phone to confirm their identity
- Scanning the extended attachments presented in the email especially to outline any kind of spyware or malware present in the email
Working over the guidelines presented above will make sure that your employees are ready to tackle the phishing attack at their best. Social engineering attacks, on the other hand, refers to the imminent need of your employees to help others, and that is why the rule of common sense applies here.
Instead of providing the person asking for help with whatever resources they are asking about, train your employees to take a step back and verify the integrity of the statements being made by the person and filtering them whether these sound unusual or not. It is an excellent trick to flee such a type of attack that attacks the personal values and needs of the workers to help other people.