The importance of cybersecurity awareness programs and it can be your first defense against cyber attacks

 Cyber attacks are getting sophisticated and growing in numbers everyday. Small medium businesses and healthcare are the new target of the cyber threat actors. Big companies are not escaping from attacks as well. A lot of cyber attacks in form of phishing and social engineering have been the main concern in the industry. This is why it's important that all staffs in your company are well-equipped with knowledge of various cyber attacks and how to protect themselves and the company. Cybersecurity awareness programs, if done in consistent and right way, can provide the company with strong defense against various cyber attacks.

There are few things that company can start doing in boosting the cybersecurity posture, such as having effective phishing campaigns, launching periodic cybersecurity awareness newsletter, reviewing and socializing company's security policies, and holding targeted cybersecurity training for specific groups of staff.

Effective Phishing Campaigns

In order to have effective phishing campaigns, they must take recent trending topics and are designed as close as possible to the actual email so staffs would naturally think that they are legitimate and "fall" for the suggested actions, such as clicking links, opening attachments or providing their credentials. Once the campaign ends, you can then send campaign closure email to all staffs and put some "hints" to help them identify phishing emails.

Cybersecurity Awareness Newsletter

It's good to have periodic newsletter about various domains in cybersecurity and remind all staffs on company's acceptable use policy. With these newsletters, all staffs will be reminded on what can and what can't be done when they are under your company's employment period and handling company's data.

Company's Security Policies

Policies are important to be established within the company as operational guidelines to safeguard the company's business continuity. Policies usually contain general clauses and standard or procedure documents can be created to have more detailed information related to the policies.

Targeted Cybersecurity Training Programs

Various training programs can be set with relevant content for different groups of people in the company. For example, you can setup secure coding practice workshop for developer team or third-party risk assessment workshop for procurement or sourcing team.

Cybersecurity awareness programs can be your first defense method in countering cyber threats. You can always start small by creating few basic policies, publishing some security related newsletters or posters, or launching a few simple phishing campaigns. Once you have done the first steps, you can review the results and consider improvements for next steps.