5 Important Employee Cybersecurity Training Tips

Employee cybersecurity training is, beyond a doubt, one of the most important things you can do to prepare your organization for the threats that exist now and into the future.

Here are 5 cybersecurity training tips to prepare your staff so that they can keep your intellectual property, data and systems safe:

1. Train all new employees – every company has different security concerns. You can’t assume that new employees will know or understand what those concerns are and how critical they may be to the business. New employee security training should be more than basic company-specific IT training (although this is also important to security!).
   Security training should include topics such as:
   1. • Highlighting key security concerns, ie. intellectual property, customer/client personal information, payment data, etc.
      • Procedures, or the how to’s of the organization: how to back up your device, how often to reboot, who is responsible for upgrading systems, how to send secure emails, etc.
      • Policies for things such as password complexity, internet usage, unauthorized software, mobile devices, and social media
      • Phishing and social engineering awareness
2. Provide ongoing security training – threats continue to develop and change. Cybercriminals will get more clever and continue to utilize more complex methods, as well as creative phishing and social engineering techniques. Your employees need to be aware of all the most current ploys, so they can be on alert.
3. Encourage the ‘If you see something, say something’ mentality – employees should know who to tell when they see something strange or unexpected: a network that is much slower today than yesterday; an email that just doesn’t look right; a pop-up that has never appeared before. Employees must feel comfortable, safe, and empowered to report such anomalies so that they can be checked out immediately.
4. Maintain continuous engagement – employees should engage with relevant sources online and on social media – new information on threats is coming out all the time. Stay on top of these by staying connected. Cybersecurity is become much more mainstream and often appears on national or local news…encourage your employees to listen to these news stories or read articles about recent breaches. You could even incentivize this to reward employees who forward good cybersecurity articles to the group!
5. Protect resources, physically – this is something that seems so basic that many companies forget to mention it, but safeguarding laptops, portable storage devices, and even direct access to servers are of key importance to cybersecurity.

Online security awareness training programs can be a great way to boost your new employee and ongoing security training. IT Direct’s security suite includes a training program with top quality training content, automated phishing attack simulations that keep users thinking about security, and reports that inform management of how the program is improving awareness.

If you would like to hear more about IT Direct’s security suite, please reach out below: