Cyberattacks – A Common Threat
Every year, companies of all sizes are victims of phishing, malware, denial of service attacks, SQL injections, hacking, and other types of cyberattacks. These attacks can impact businesses in many ways, including loss or damage to electronic data, extortion losses, loss of income, network security and privacy lawsuits, and damage to the company’s reputation.
The good news? You can protect your business from cyberattacks with a holistic, preventative approach – identifying needs and gaps before incidents occur.
Arm Your Team With Knowledge, Tools, and Processes
As technology advances, so do the risks of cyberattacks. Cloud computing, IoT devices, and new software applications improve productivity but also the risk of attacks. Arming your team with the ability to recognize potential threats, manage data properly, and ensure that security controls are in place and effective are all highly effective ways of protecting your company.
Many companies have security policies documented in manuals and shared through training covering things like changing passwords, storing documents, and so on. And while this is useful, it’s all too common for hackers to use phishing emails and similar tactics, making employees the first line of defense that needs to be armed and strengthened with knowledge, tools, and processes to protect the company.
Security Culture
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – SOCRATES
At Pareto Cyber, we help IT leaders like you build proactive cyberculture and strong defenses to protect your company, data, and people.
We recommend a three-step process: evaluate, establish, and educate.
Evaluate
We start by assessing your security program objectives and then evaluate and identify high-risk sub-cultures within the company’s community. This could be by business unit, subsets of employees, geographies, and more.
Establish
Next, we create your cybersecurity brand, leveraging your company’s overarching brand, value proposition, and mission statement to extend established overall culture to cyberculture.
This brand is then socialized and established through executive champions – company leaders who amplify the key messages in your newly crafted cybersecurity brand, giving it visibility and support.
Educate
The next step is to build a customer-centric security team dedicated to helping employees understand possible cyber risks and their implications, illustrating how day-to-day behavior can impact the entire organization, and providing prompt assistance and support.
To drive faster adoption and organizational shift, we recommend a multi-faceted education program, including e-learning and executive endorsement and support.
Cyberculture – A Continuous Process
Over time, organizations change. New employees will be onboarded, the structure will shift. Evaluating the effectiveness of your program will help your organization reach cyber maturity, ensuring you have the controls in place to protect the company.
This is the hallmark of a quality program and will be the difference between effecting real change and “checking the box” on awareness.
