3 Reasons You Should Equip Your Company with Cybersecurity Training

How many of you want to cry after hearing about the recent WannaCry ransomware attack? As so many before it, WannaCry infects and propagates via a Window’s exploit; in this case a Window’s SMB network protocol.

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service, FedEx, Germany’s railway company Deutch Bahn, and many other businesses had their file systems hijacked, followed by a pop-up demand for sums ranging from $300 – 600 dollars in untraceable Bitcoin currency to unlock each infected file.

Ransomware

While most who have updated their systems since can rest easy that WannaCry can no longer hurt them, the entire issue has highlighted the need for businesses of all sizes to take their business’s cybersecurity prevention into their own hands.

Just because WannaCry isn’t a threat any longer doesn’t mean its little brother, GoldenEye, won’t learn from its software sibling’s mistakes!

There are a number of consequences facing businesses of all sizes due to such attacks:

  • Downtime – all the time it costs to you and your clients.
  • Reduced trust levels from customers after the fallout.
  • Decreases in staff morale following the attack.
  • Costs to eliminate and recover from threats.
  • Lost marketshare due to stolen data being used against you and/or customers leaving after their data is breached.

This is the short list. One thing is for sure, it’s impossible to predict the costs of any threat until the damage is assessed. Businesses can’t be reactionary with their cybersecurity; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

Cybersecurity training – a must do

All who work in your company need to be aware of things hackers do to infiltrate your business’s data, and what they can do to help prevent it. It isn’t enough anymore just to have a competent IT department protecting your company – everyone needs to know and understand how to protect the company’s data against tech-related threats.

That’s why Cyber Security Training is a must at all levels.

Cloud security

Top 3 Benefits of Cybersecurity Training:

1. Empowered staff, better culture.

Pretty much 99% of the time, employees have no idea how important their daily actions are at maintaining the integrity of company and client data. They click “trusted” links in their email and while browsing the Internet, and have no idea if malware is being injected into the system by an unscrupulous hacker (those with scruples work for the good guys!)

By empowering staff with cybersecurity training, they’ll gain more awareness as to their role in data security and will also hold their coworkers responsible for their role in protecting valuable data.

2. Competitive advantage.

After online cheat-on-your-spouse dating site, Ashley Madison was breached, the site was just never the same for former customers. This brand and many others, just can’t recover after a serious costly and embarrassing data breach occurs. It’s likely that yours won’t either, unless you take affirmative action now to prevent attacks from happening in the first place.

In the case of the once massive online dating giant, their forum could no longer promise married promiscuity without the threat of being caught – customers couldn’t trust them anymore. Not to mentioned an inquiry into the matter showed that up to 95% of the female profiles on the site were, in fact, fake!

Once a breach affects your customers, they’ll move on and find a company that hasn’t suffered a threat, and who has the proper cybersecurity protocols in place to protect their information.

3. Improved data security.

Obvious, I know. But, increased data security is the biggest benefit to empowering you and your staff with cybersecurity training. Ignorance of threats and their consequences is no longer an excuse with malware and ransomware threats like Petya, WannaCry and the latest hack, “GoldenEye,” high-jacking big data all over the world.

Takeaway

Data security is up to you. You can’t rely on the NSA and Microsoft to protect you all the time – certainly not to help recover and secure your stolen data after the fact!

Considering we live in the data driven age, and that data is among the most important aspect of modern business, any business with a smartphone and a computer needs to be trained in threat avoidance and detection.

There are many ways to get such training. The B.S. in Information Technology program offered by King University is one of ways to equip you with a much-needed IT foundation to build your expertise upon.

Knowledge is power. Are you ready to get empowered?

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