It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and the topic is more important now than ever. Just as positive new developments in technology emerge every day, new cyber threats do also.
Thanks to generative AI, it’s getting more difficult to spot fraudulent emails and texts through grammar and spelling errors alone. Your best defense is employees who have made it a habit to wonder if each email, text, and Teams or Slack message they receive is a typical and reasonable request. “Should I click this link?” is something everyone should ask every time, even if they’re tired, busy, or in a hurry.
Ongoing education is your employees’ best tool to stay ahead of threats—and you can start building a culture of awareness today, for no cost. You can educate employees and IT staff together, in a way that doesn’t lean on a punishment approach of tricking employees into clicking on sample email messages sent by your IT department. Yes, you will have to test employees’ skills regularly, but if everyone learns and shares together, it can be a team-building exercise.
The Impact of a Cyberattack on an SMB
Take a moment to imagine the impact a breach could have on your business by calculating how much it would cost you to stop doing business for one day. How about two days, or longer? Incidents like ransomware attacks are usually enabled by one employee clicking a malicious link in a phishing email. Just one incident could result in loss of business, reputation, and customers.
A Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) “Cost of a Cyber Incident” report noted in 2020 that the average per-incident cost listed in commercial cyber-threat databases (such as NetDiligence and Cisco) ranges from $394,000 to $19.9 million in data for the U.S. and exceeds $40 million in the global data.
Protect your Company with a Culture of Cybersecurity Awareness
To be effective, cybersecurity awareness training and education must be ongoing and built into company culture. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a toolkit guide to get you started. You can also distribute materials like the agency’s awareness infographic and bingo card.
Establishing a culture of awareness can be as simple as having employees share smishing and phishing messages that they’ve come across, whether in in-person team meetings, virtual lunch-and-learns, or company newsletters. This generates discussion and provides concrete examples for learning.
Customized training is also effective. An experienced IT partner can tailor training programs to your industry, using training examples from those sectors, as attacks are becoming more targeted and specific to the company.
When it does come time to test employees’ knowledge, your IT partner can help here too. Talk to us today about the various training methods that would be most effective for your company.