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The Key to Better Cybersecurity: Keep Employee Rules Simple
What’s the best way to ensure that there are no breaches in your organization? Simple – make sure that each employee at every level understands the rules and regulations. How do you do that? By making sure that its expressed in the simplest terms possible. When there is no need for any over-complication and no requirement for explaining it twice, you’ve done your job well.
When thinking about designing your cybersecurity guidelines, you need to imagine that you’re talking to a young child who doesn’t really get what all the fuss is about. This is because when we use simple terms we can communicate those terms at scale so that employees can have a shared consciousness around it.
They won’t know why something is wrong, but they’ll get a gut feeling about it. That’s the important part of getting a message right. You need to make it so that it sits well in the back of their minds. That’s why being covert and simple is key.
The more jargons, language, verbiage you toss their way, the more they’ll shut down. If you can’t explain the subject matter in the simplest of terms, then you’ve introduced a major hole in your own security systems.
The problem of Social engineering
Want to know how hackers get the data most of the time? Through social engineering. They simply talk authoritatively and get their access in. Sometimes they even ask IT technicians to check out a fake website, that spoofs an internet connection on their PCs. Through that process, they’re able to get access to a major chunk of the data provided by the firm.
Other times, hackers can have a simple conversation with the employees working there, either at lunch or at their desks. This way, they can easily get more information into what’s really happening in the company and get real-time insights. They can even sometimes meet with them, posing as a recruiter and asking them information about their role and what they’re working on.
Social engineering is a huge problem plaguing the IT world right now, as there is no solution to fixing that problem. You can write lines of codes to figure out what’s the best approach to it all. But you can’t prepare a security wall around an employee who puts their password on a sticky note on their computers.
The best solution to the problem of social engineering is to prepare the employees for it. What’s important is that you talk to them in the simplest terms possible so that you can get the message across in one go. Otherwise you may have to keep talking to them over and over again about how they should not talk about these things outside.
Shortcuts for longer procedures
When companies have detailed policies like changing your password every few months or syncing off all devices for a day or two, it can disrupt the natural flow of work. So, what do employees do? They change a few letters and keep the same password. They also find workaround ways to get beyond any locks and blocks on content.
They can figure out a shortcut if it works in their favor, and they can develop new tricks that can be spread across the company floor. This leads to mini holes in the company’s architecture, leading to more hacks and private data being leaked.
Shortcuts can be a huge problem especially when it comes to neutralizing any impending threats. This is when the company has just been recently attacked and the entry point could be through multiple points of access. Since everyone keeps simple passwords, it may have been that much simpler to get multiple levels of clearance at the touch of a button.
By keeping your instructions short and clear you’re going to get a better response rate. You’re also going to want to talk a bit more about why you’re doing the things that you are. This is so that you can keep things in check and have more control over the messaging. Otherwise employees may feel like mission-critical areas may be compromised through laziness. Talking to them about critical areas is also important.
Employee education
One of the best ways to ensure that your workplace is completely secure is to make sure that your employees feel educated about these issues. If they’re in the loop of things and understand the basics of cybersecurity, they’ll be less likely to make these mistakes.
They’re also going to be less likely to create future hassles and more likely to enforce the rules for other people. It will become a part of the job, and their knowledge about security will become that much more cemented.
Employee education in key areas like cybersecurity allows the organization to create new strategies that aren’t reliant on employee failure. They can plan accordingly, and create new offices, wings or departments through which information can flow easily. This opens up more opportunities for employees to excel by partaking in multiple projects through an open layer system.
However, if you scare these employees into following the rules, they may get even more scared when they don’t know what to do. Just like riding a bike for the first time, you want to give simple instructions and leave room for error.
Conclusion
One of the biggest reasons why security functions aren’t working out the way that they’re supposed to is because they’re not designed to work well with human error. There are so many restrictions, regulations and rules around cyber that we humans tend to forget them. We might even panic sometimes because the rules don’t seem to be too clean or coherent.
That’s where a lot of cyberattacks happen and we end up compromising one of our biggest assets – our data. We need to make sure that we don’t overwhelm our employees with too much information about cyber security so that they can continue to do their jobs safely.