The coronavirus epidemic turned our lives upside down last year. But most people overlook another virus that arose with the coronavirus. This virus is an invisible virus just like COVID-19 that causes worldwide fatal events. The only source of this virus is cyber attacks. According to experts, cybercrime has increased unprecedentedly since the coronavirus epidemic started. And it’s our duty to prevent these attacks. Until today, many methods have been developed against attacks. One of them is cybersecurity awareness training. So, why is cybersecurity awareness training important?
Why Is Cybersecurity Awareness Training Important?: What Do The Experts Say?
According to experts, the reason cybercrime peaked with the coronavirus epidemic is that hackers use the epidemic to organize e-mail phishing attacks. Hackers often use this method, as it is easy to hunt down people affected by the epidemic. In this era of social engineering attacks, hackers often pretend to work in government offices such as the Tax Office, demanding sensitive information from victims.
Unfortunately, protecting yourself from such attacks is not as easy as protecting yourself from coronavirus. Cyber attacks can find you even while in quarantine, you can fall victim to a cyberattack anywhere, anytime. In addition, there is no cure or vaccine against these cyber attacks yet. Hackers try to trap us by taking advantage of our weaknesses in exactly this way. Hackers, especially targeting employees of large and global companies, detect weak links in companies and conduct phishing attacks against these people. The biggest reason why these phishing attacks are successful is that employees do not have cyber awareness.
Therefore, one of the most important issues for companies during the quarantine period was the training of employees. IT experts at all companies worked day and night, doing their best to train and motivate employees during the remote working period. However, the efforts of IT experts alone were not enough to prevent the attacks. The most important thing that was noticed during this process was the importance of cyber awareness.
Why Is Cybersecurity Awareness Training Important ?: What is Cyber Awareness?
Cyber awareness is something we can achieve beyond ordinary cybersecurity training by integrating cybersecurity into every aspect of our lives. As hackers play into the weak link among company employees, what you need to do is to ensure that there is no weak link in your company. You can do this only by ensuring that each employee gains cyber awareness. Conscious employees can defend the company against potential phishing attacks and prevent damage from the attacks.
As mentioned above, cyber awareness is quite different from cybersecurity education. Awareness is gained by realizing, processing, or learning threats in the name. We can show our awareness by putting this information into practice. In other words, providing employees with cyber awareness means feeding them the necessary information against cybersecurity threats and preparing them for attacks. Cyber awareness training does exactly that.
The most effective defense against phishing and ransomware attacks is to educate all your employees in the company about what to do in a potential attack. In other words, it is not enough for a team to have awareness in the field of cybersecurity, the important thing is to provide a company-wide cyber awareness. Forging a united front against hackers will surprise them and prevent them from making their attacks successful. In other words, defending against cyber threats is a team effort. Now that we understand what cyber awareness is, it’s time for our main question.
Why Is Cybersecurity Awareness Training Important?
Most cybersecurity training does not focus on raising awareness, but on repeating topics, giving examples from past attacks. Technical terms, corporate communication, and boring contents used in these training prevent employees from paying attention to training. These cybersecurity programs, full of boring content, have almost no effect against phishing attacks. These training do not make any contribution and tire the IT teams even more. IT teams deal with the consequences of these violations, as untrained employees will cause violations.
Phishing attacks have been talked about a lot in recent years, but there is not much talk about how to stop the attacks. IT teams generally approach phishing as a technological problem, and neglect issues such as phishing awareness and employee training. This so-called cybersecurity training, which is repeated annually, is no longer enough to protect companies from attacks. The secret to real and effective cybersecurity training is to ensure the participation of your employees in the training and to raise awareness. So how can you instill awareness of your employees that you expect to protect your company from cyberattacks? How should effective cyber awareness training be? Let’s examine it together.
All employees need to learn how to counter phishing and social engineering attacks. A cybersecurity program should include the necessary soft skills for this.
How To Plan The Training?
- Train your employees in setting and maintaining effective passwords using password manager applications. You should avoid using short and simple passwords that are easy to guess. In addition, examine the vulnerabilities in your systems. Do not delay in providing protection against your vulnerabilities. You can provide effective protection by performing your inspections monthly instead of annually.
- Cyber Security Awareness Training should be supported by Phishing Simulations. Employees must learn how to detect hackers or phishing attacks and how to defend themselves. Phishing simulations are very effective in this regard, as they prepare employees for potential threats that may face them in real life. You can determine the skills of your employees according to the phishing simulation results.
- Continuous communication is essential for phishing training to continue to be effective even after training. When an employee faces a phishing attack, he/she should be able to quickly alert management and make necessary warnings to teammates. You can use our Incident Response tool for this. With its easy and effective interface, our tool supports you in reporting phishing emails, reduces the time to report attacks, and helps you minimize risks.
- Considering how much our attention span has decreased in recent years, cybersecurity training must be adjusted accordingly. Try our Cyber Security Awareness Trainer for this. Our trainer helps you to organize the appropriate content interactively and present it to the employees. When it comes to training, another need is that all employees, including C-level managers, are given the same training. This will increase the sense of unity and solidarity in your company and make training more effective. Therefore, managers, the IT team, and the Human Resources team should work together and plan training together.
“This post is originally published at www.phishing.org.uk”
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