How to Use Cybersecurity Awareness Training To Change Employee Behavior?

Due to increased malware and ransomware attacks, data security has become a priority of companies. However, the organizations still need to stress training employees to be aware of handling security. In most of the cases, the attacks initiate when an employee becomes a victim of a phishing attack or have mishandled network or server settings.

All of the breaches have a common denominator, a human, who has mistakenly opened a link or changed settings, therefore it is important to train employees to keep their eyes and ears while operating any critical things. The employees need to know about the entire security program so that they could change the behavior.

Never carry the attitude that a small firm could not get affected by these cyber-attacks. The cybercriminals don’t spare anyone, and employee unintentionally are the reason behind it. As per Enterprise Strategy Group, 38 per cent of cybersecurity professionals of small scale businesses is at risk of getting victimized due to employee behavior.

That’s why organizations need to work on it to secure the crucial and confidential data of the company. It can be done by implementing a security awareness program.

Shifting from “Check-the-Box” Intellect to Change In Behavior

There could be many reasons to execute security awareness programs, one of them could be work on compliance.  The organization which wants to abide by data protection or IT regulations should stick to a security awareness program along with employee training to meet requirements of compliance.

Having said that, “check the box” mentality of taking all employees to get trained, which will not ensure a positive effect on the company’s security condition. As the companies could make it mandatory to get its employees trained but this doesn’t guarantee that they will follow the security routine and participate in ensuring organization security. The security awareness program can only be said to be successful when it is comprehensive.

Also Read : Why Is It Challenging To Secure Data In A BYOD Era?

To make security awareness program effective, a continuous education which keeps the audience engaged is needed. Also, regular phishing simulations can be planned to check the progress. Also, the security awareness program should stress repetition and its influence on behavior. This will show how it affects someone while handling data.

The duty of protecting confidential data doesn’t only include IT professionals or employees, attention from senior executives of the company. They must be aware of the significance of information security and why cybersecurity awareness program is a important.

How To Check The Progress?

As you have used a comprehensive security awareness program to shift changes employee behavior towards security in an organization, you need to check these pointers to notice the change:

• Decrease in password reset requests
• A decrease in the number of PCs which are reinstalled or reimaged due to infections.
• A decrease in lost computer systems.
• A significant decrease in computer downtime related to precarious behavior.

People change when changing seems easier than being redundant. So, the Cybersecurity Awareness Training should be challenging, planned as well as continuous to make it work.