BFC Bulletins Monthly News Digest
Tags Cybersecurity HR
Smart leaders know that their entire team needs to be well-educated on the importance and best practices of cybersecurity if they hope to protect their data. Here are 10 tips for effectively teaching cybersecurity to your entire team:
- Explain the business benefits of secure data – each function, role and team member is responsible for protecting business data; make sure your team knows why this is important.
- Use metaphors and analogies – make the conversation clear and relevant to the audience in a way they are familiar with.
- Personalize trainings by department – providing an easy to consume, targeted training that regularly maps cybersecurity issues to someone’s role typically works best.
- Highlight positive progress – give employees a progress report card that highlights positive improvements to get further “buy in” to your company’s policies and procedures.
- Stick to the basics and practical aspects – avoid getting into the technical ways cybersecurity works; focus instead on what to look for in terms of suspicious activity.
- Establish and communicate consistent processes – variations in processes are how people fall for unfamiliar messages; consistency helps avoid that pitfall.
- Help employees understand the direct negative impact of poor security – convey why cybersecurity is important on a personal level as well as how compromised data can have a direct negative impact on individual lives.
- Encourage the “sanity check” – ask everyone to do the “sanity check”: double-check the reply address before sending emails; double-check the web URL before you enter sensitive information; and log out of sensitive sites after your work is done there.
- Simulate a hack – new services let you launch internal campaigns that mimic hacker techniques as a way to educate and evaluate your employees.
- Establish a foundation of common cyber sense – cybersecurity is ultimately a team effort, but team leaders need to make sure everyone is educated on common tactics and basic cybersecurity hygiene.
