What Does Effective Security Training Involve Nowadays?

One major aspect of your business’ security is how well your team is trained to preserve it. Let’s go over some of the aspects that you need to be sure you address as you educate your team.

Why is Security Training So Important?

With the improvements that have been made to security in general over the years, many cybercriminals of all kinds find it far simpler to go through your users as a means of bypassing your protections. There’s also the fact that there are plenty of ways that you and your team could make the cybercriminal’s job easier by undermining your own protections.

So, plain and simple, security training is required to minimize the risk of your team members being used to undermine your business.

This all leads to an important question: what needs to be involved in your training to help protect your business from these kinds of issues? 

Let’s go over some critical topics.

Social Engineering Awareness

Like we said, users are—generally speaking, at least—one of the most potentially vulnerable elements of any business. However, they have the potential to become one of any business’ greatest security assets at the same time. Repeatedly reinforcing how prevalent social engineering efforts are, showing them examples, and frequently testing them with simulated phishing attacks are all effective ways to raise your team’s awareness of the threats they face and prepare them to deal with them appropriately.

Security Protections and Preparations

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can focus exclusively on your employees’ preparedness and neglect what you can directly influence. Installing and, crucially, maintaining your network protections will help reduce the number of threats that your team needs to interface with directly. Every phishing attack that your spam blocker stops is one less that could fool one of your employees. Every software update that is installed in a timely manner equates to less time a cybercriminal has to strike. Teaching your team about the defenses they need to have allows them to better work with them in place, and helps educate them to optimally supplement these tools through their own aforementioned alertness.

Debunking Problematic Presumptions

It’s likely that many of your employees feel that your business isn’t very likely to be targeted by a cyberattack. You may have these feelings yourself—and if so, thank you for sticking around this far into the blog. However, we need to discuss this for a moment. With many of today’s cyberattacks not needing active involvement, many cybercriminals essentially take the shotgun approach, hitting as many targets at random as possible. So, while the thought that you won’t be targeted may not be wrong, it’s very different from the presumption that you’ll never be attacked.

Want to Improve Your Security Training?

White Mountain IT Services is here to help. Turn to us to find out how we can prepare your network against modern threats, and teach your team how to keep it that much safer. Give us a call at 603-889-0800 today.