Cyber security awareness is an essential part of any cyber security processes. It ensures that all of your employees can understand, recognise, react, and report on threats to your cyber security such as phishing and social engineering attacks. With remote working making it easier to target out of office workers that might fall for a fake email, employees need to be more aware than ever to ensure that they can recognise these attempts and react in an appropriate way to ensure the company’s safety.
So what is the purpose of cyber security awareness? The purpose of cyber security awareness is to educate employees on what threats are out there and how to act responsibly to avoid these threats. 82% of data breaches are through human error, so training your employees to recognise and react to these risks is essential to protect your business.
Keep reading to learn more about what cyber security awareness is, why it’s important, and what the five main benefits of training your employees are.
What is Cyber Security Awareness?
Cyber security awareness is an ongoing process that aims to educate and train employees on the threats and vulnerabilities they need to be aware of in order to prevent and react to cyber security incidents.
Put simply, cyber security awareness is about knowing what threats are out there, and acting responsibly to avoid these threats. This is an ongoing process because security threats evolve constantly, which means that your employees need to do the same in order to avoid them.
Cyber security awareness programs help to improve your company’s processes and tighten security measures, which in turn creates a more resilient business. In order for cyber security awareness to be effective, it must be employed organisation-wide. If this isn’t the case then attackers may target the weakest point – which could be one of your staff members.
Why is Security Awareness Important?
While having the best defence systems that money can buy is an effective way of keeping your organisation safe, unfortunately, it’s often not enough. 82% of data breaches were the result of human error in 2022. This includes employees exposing information directly e.g. misconfiguring databases, or by making a mistake that enables cyber criminals to access the company’s systems. Cyber security awareness is a way of mitigating this human error, and stops your employees being the weakness in your defence.
As we all know, security incidents can be detrimental to a company’s success. Nearly 60% of companies affected by a data breach are likely to go out of business due to reputational damage because customers don’t see your company in the same light and lose trust in you. Breaches and cyber attacks are also expensive, cost money and resources to correct, prevent access to key systems to continue your work, and can result in fines and legal repercussions.
Do you think that your employees need to improve their cyber security awareness? NEBRC offers in-depth cyber security awareness training that can help your employees become the first line of defence against a cyber attack.
Benefits of Cyber Security Awareness Training
While there are many benefits to adequately training your staff in cyber security awareness, understanding the key benefits can enable you to improve your training processes and protect your organisation from data breaches and cyber attacks. Here we’ve listed the top five benefits of cyber security awareness training and how it could improve your business’s safety.
1. Create a Security Aware Culture
Because human error plays such a huge role in cyberattacks and data breaches, having adequately trained employees is key to ensuring your business is secured effectively. Giving your employees the knowledge to recognise, react, and report on threats will enable them to become another line of defence in your security processes, instead of a weakness that attackers can exploit.
When training is offered on an ongoing basis, it stays in the forefront of your employee’s minds, and creates a security aware culture throughout the organisation. This provides the confidence in your employees to know what to do when that important time comes and ensures that they make the right decisions.
2. Threat Reduction
An effective cyber security awareness program is a huge factor in reducing the risks that could lead to data breaches and cyber attacks. Employees will benefit from knowledge of security best practices, applications, and technologies that should be employed, including how to act on social media, email, and websites. The program can educate employees to understand and recognise phishing and other social engineering attacks.
Another option for cyber security awareness training is to conduct phishing simulations. This is where deceptive emails that are representative of phishing emails are sent to employees to test their response. Using simulations like this can enable an organisation to see how their employees respond to malicious emails and prompt further training for the individuals that need it.
3. Avoid Downtime
Data breaches and cyber attacks can be a cause of immense downtime while you go through the process of responding to the incident and reinstating normal business operations. When all of your employees are familiar with the cyber security awareness principles and understand how they can play a part in keeping your organisation safe, cyberattacks are far less likely to take place and your business can continue to run smoothly.
4. Compliance
Businesses have a legal responsibility to adhere to regulations and keep data safe. If you mishandle data and it results in a breach, it could be followed by fines and legal proceedings that can have a detrimental effect on your business. This can become worse if you fail to comply with the investigations that will follow. The ICO is able to enforce a fine of up to £17.5 million or 4% of your total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.
5. Increase Customer Confidence
While the threats and risks associated with cyber security increase, so does consumer knowledge of them. Consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about cyber security threats and businesses need to implement solutions that prove that they’re ready to deal with them. In doing so, companies can improve their customer’s confidence in them and ensure that they can effectively build trust, which brings repeat customers back time and again.
Cyber security training helps to ensure that customers know that the business is taking an active role in securing their data and information. This increases their confidence in the company and they will be more likely to do business with them.
Learn More About Cyber Security Awareness Training With NEBRC
At NEBRC, we’re a police-led, not-for-profit organisation that’s dedicated to helping you improve and maintain your cyber safety. We work closely with you to help you keep your data safe around the clock and reduce your risk of an incident you can sign up to our free core membership here.
Visit our website to learn more about our Cyber Security Awareness Training, or see what other services we have to offer. If it’s a more tailored solution that you’re looking for, get in touch today.