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Training your workforce about cyber security

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cyber securityWhatever the size of your business, one thing you have to remember is that you are always at risk of cyber security attacks. This type of criminal activity has only increase over the years, with many businesses, both big and small, having fallen victim to hacks.

Despite the fact that we now have a wide range of sophisticated tools, resources, and systems to help protect our businesses from cyber attacks, the perpetrators have become more sophisticated in terms of the methods that they use. As a result, they have managed to keep up with the evolution of cyber security solutions.

To see this in real life, you need only to look at the fact that the state government has created the Cyber Innovation and Training Center.

It is important to ensure you do a proper assessment so that you can see where the weaknesses are for your business and take appropriate steps in terms of the cyber security systems and tools that you put in place. However, this is just part of the solution if you want to ensure you have proper security measures in place. The other big thing you need to do is make sure your workforce has a reasonable knowledge of cyber crime and cyber security.

Why is this important?

When it comes to data center security, you need to have various systems in place to protect data and stop security breaches. However, it is also important to remember that cyber attacks are often targeted toward lower level staff because cyber criminals know that this is one of the easiest and most effective means of getting access to systems and information. Why?

Because many businesses do not bother providing lower level employees with any form of training so unless they take an active interest in these issues in their own time, they will have no means of identifying a possible cyber attack or any form of cyber crime. Additionally, no matter how sophisticated an attack might be, it is almost always traced back to human error.

A common issue that has affected many people is a scam known as phishing. This is where a link is set to an employee and looks to be from someone that is trusted such as a colleague or a company that you deal with. However, when the employee then clicks on the link it can lead to all sorts of issues from infecting systems to taking them to fake websites where they could end up entering sensitive data in the belief that the site is bona fide.

Employees should be made aware that they should never click on links through emails to access a website, especially when they seem suspicious. Instead, they should manually enter the site they need into the browser. In addition, they need to be made aware that they should not be opening attachments from unknown sources.

Making sure you provide at least basic training on cyber security issues to your employees can be well worth it in the long run. This could be an important investment that could ultimately save your business a huge amount of time, inconvenience, stress, and even money. There are various courses that you can send your employees on or you could get an expert to come to your place of business to provide training onsite.

Here is a great resource that offers many free online courses regaring cyber security, IT infrastructe and more. You owe it to yourself, your company and your employees to make this an on-going part of your training program.

The world of cyber security will always be a cat versus mouse game, but when done correctly, you can make sure you and your team are the cats, chasing those mice, and not the other way around!

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Contributors

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