It’s no secret that modern hackers are quite crafty these days. Instead of going for your cybersecurity measures head on, they will look for a backdoor into your system, instead. The main reason is that such backdoors are created by none other than your employees.
But are they to blame for this? Absolutely not. Every employee is hired for a specific job position. It’s not their job to worry about your security measures. If you want them to be more vigilant about potential security threats that are aim at them, you’ll have to teach them how to spot techybio them.
The sooner company owners realize this, the better. Conducting a human risk review is, therefore, of vital importance for your company and its security measures. With that in mind, let’s explore how to assess the level of human risk factor for your cybersecurity measures.
Conducting a survey
The first thing you may consider doing is asking your employees regarding how much they know about potential cybersecurity threats and whether or not they are capable of recognizing such potential threats they may encounter while working. Conducting a simple survey can tell you a lot about the human risk factor in your company.
Based on the level of the risk, you may decide to provide additional training for employees in order to prepare them and help them better manage the situation, should they find themselves in one, to begin with. However, considering the tenacity of modern hackers, it’s just a matter of time before employees become targets of scam attempts like phishing scams, for instance.
Simulate an attack
Threat simulation is another way to properly assess the level of human risk factor for your company’s cybersecurity measures. A simulated phishing email, for example, is a good way to determine how good your employees are at spotting these threats. The more employees fall for the scam, the higher the risk factor is and vice versa. Still, the vast majority of phishing scams are quite sophisticated these days.
As a matter of fact, they are socially engineered to look more convincing and realistic. Therefore, you can’t really blame employees for falling for such a scam. Also, you can’t rely on employees alone to be vigilant all the time. People can have a bad day and get tired so they may not historyglow realize that there is something wrong with the link they’ve got in an email before it’s too late.
Implement stricter policies
First of all, your cybersecurity measures should be advanced enough to help protect your company from any potential breaches and scam attempts. However, if you wish to minimize human risk factor as much as possible, you will have to implement stricter policies regarding what employees can and should do in certain situations. Let’s take phishing scams as an example again.
A policy that prevents employees from opening or clicking on links from any source may hinder their job and productivity. But enforcing a policy that every email needs to be scanned for threats before being opened is something entirely different. Therefore, lowering human risk factor comes down to having a solid strategy that will aid employees in avoiding falling victim to a scam attempt.
