Table of Contents
- What Is Cyber Security Awareness?
- What Is Spear-Phishing?
- The Importance Of Cyber Security
- Best Practices for Cyber Security Awareness
What Is Cyber Security Awareness?
Cyber security awareness is the ability to know and protect a business’s information. Having cyber security employees means that they understand how cyber threats can harm their business and what steps they need to take to protect their online workspaces from cyber-attacks.
Making sure that your employees know how to keep their information safe doesn’t mean that your business won’t be at risk of being hacked or having its data stolen. Malware has grown, becoming more and more sophisticated as each new strand is made. We expect cyber-threats and malware to keep getting better and better. In 2005, it was said that 123 new types of malware were found every single day of the year. During that year, 10,000 of those threats were new malware strains that were never seen. Eleven years later, the research found that four new strains of malicious malware were found every second in Q3 of 2016. It’s important to note that these were the strains that cyber security companies had found and identified. As new strains of malware emerge, businesses need to make sure they’re taking the right steps to keep their systems safe, educating their employees, and removing any weaknesses that make them vulnerable to an attack. Human error is an egregious act that can lead to fines and a lot of damage to your business.
Phishing Scams – The Most Popular And Effective Technique
Your company’s cyber security is only as good as its weakest employee. A data breach is more likely to be caused by human error than a criminal hack. When you try to build a risk-aware culture in the workplace, you keep your employees from unknowingly participating in cyber-crime.
What Is Spear-Phishing?
Attackers send emails that look like they’re from someone else, but they’re actually from someone else. They try to get into software by downloading malicious malware through an attachment. The perpetrators target specific businesses or people intending to access sensitive information without permission. To get malware on their computer, they have to open an attachment in an email containing malware. This gives hackers a way into the software of the company, from which they can move laterally in search of important and valuable information. Because spear-phishing attacks aren’t very common, they’re more likely to be made by hackers who want money, industry secrets, and sensitive information.
The act of “spear-phishing” sounds simple, but it has evolved over the last few years and is now very hard to detect, especially if there is no previous knowledge or protection software in place. A person’s personal information is used to find them because they put it on the internet. If a hacker looks at an employee’s social media profiles, they might find out their email address, job title, interests, location, and posts about new products they’ve just bought, among other things. They do this because they have all of this information. They then pretend to be a friend or someone familiar and send a convincing but fake message to their target. In some cases, people have been asked to open malicious attachments or click on links that take them to fake websites that ask for passwords, account numbers, PINs, and other codes.
The Importance Of Cyber Security
Colleagues need to know how they help a business improve its cyber security. Most of the time, you need to start from the very beginning. Cybercrime isn’t going away, and a cyber-attack could shut down an entire company. This is not only the best thing you can do for yourself, but it also shows that you’re moving in the right direction. If your company is the victim of a cyber-attack, the ICO will look at the steps you took to protect it. Businesses need to make sure their employees are aware of basic cyber security measures, and one of them is making sure they know about cyber security.
Best Practices for Cyber Security Awareness
If CEOs, directors, and managers want their data to stay safe, they have to teach their coworkers about cyber security and build a culture of cyber security awareness at work. Here are some cybersecurity best practices that every company should be following:
Implement Basic Cyber Security Training
It will ensure that employees use approved software and have strong passwords if they have training sessions. You could also think about putting common-sense rules in place for how staff can use technology and think about adding more protection for them with multi-factor authentication. This could be as simple as not letting employees take their laptops home at the weekend or making them use two-step verification to prove they are who they say they are.
Have A Data Recovery Strategy
During a recent survey, it was found that one in five businesses don’t have a procedure or backup plan to use if their data is lost or stolen. As more organizations depend on the cloud, it’s critical to verify that your cloud-based data is secure and compliant with the new GDPR. In addition, you need to make sure your employees know what the plan is and who is in charge of what.
Detect And Plan For The Things You Can’t Avoid
You must ensure that you have the tools and information necessary to rapidly determine whether or not your computer has been hacked so that you can correct the problem as soon as possible. To avoid a huge loss event, you can contain the damage and get back to business quickly. A security information and event management solution will collect logs from applications, operating systems, and network infrastructure appliances from all over the company. It will then look through the data to see any suspicious activity and flag it to the right people.
Humans are the weakest link in cyber security, and if your employees can’t make smart decisions about things like which network to connect to or which email attachment to open, you could be at risk of a huge cyber-attack. Because your company’s cyber security is only as powerful as its weakest employee, it’s up to you to ensure that your staff are aware of the threats.
To know more about Cyber Security, please call us at (833) 292-4868 today.
