Why your security awareness program fails?

Why your security awareness program fails?

by Malik korrich ~ jeudi 25 août 2016

The best way to protect organizations from cyber threat is to train employees, conduct an awareness program that enables them to work securely. Although risk is everywhere, millions of people become victim of identity theft each year and the number is rising.

Even the best cyber security solution can’t protect your organization when your employees are unaware of the severity of their routine practice. Regular awareness can train them to handle threats at a granular level.

Many organizations failed to provide successful security awareness to their employees. There are certain deficiencies in awareness programs that are relevant to the poor state of the awareness in many organizations.

Poor Governance:

The greatest deficiency in most of the awareness programs is that they focus on what not to do instead of focusing on what they are supposed to do. Implementation of good security related behavior is the main purpose of this awareness program. In other words, security awareness programs should be the promotion of behaviors defined in governance.

Security policies and procedures are not referred when conducting day to day tasks; it is the major flaw that skips the detection of threats on a routine bases.

Relying on Fear:

In many organizations, the awareness program lacks the positive promotion of procedures and techniques. This is a gross mistake that makes security awareness program a big flop. Organizations are more concerned with frightening the employees so they adopt the awareness tips, surprisingly, it left employee afraid to do their basic routine task.

Awareness program should not scare the employees; instead make them more confident to look ahead while performing their tasks safely.

The Hacker Mentality:

The main objective of awareness program is to tell people that how a hacker can hack them and then telling not to fall victim to it. For example, they will tell you how a hacker can ask for your password over the phone, but you should not give out your password over the telephone.

The deficiency in telling what not to do specifically is that the hacker will apply other techniques to acquire the passwords. They can ask the employee to modify registry files in the computer, as they are not told to deny such activity in an awareness program.

Bad Technical Security:

The users should not be allowed to install software on systems, therefore ransomware should not be allowed to install on a system, if a user opens a malicious file. Storage devices should be encrypted and access to the suspicious and unsafe website should be prohibited.

Although, users are aware of threats and security, but leaving technical security can be dangerous. It will work as a second layer to the end user that is securely operating. Poor technical security enables the inevitable user failing to become a serious incident.

Treating Awareness as an ordinary activity:

While treating awareness program as ordinary activity, you are allowing insecure access to the internet from your own employees. It can be disastrous to the organization if attacker compromises or trick user to gain access.

Making awareness program the top priority is the only solution to overcome many threats at initial and base level. Many organization think it’s unnecessary to do so, and it changes the whole scenario when came in contact to any cyber attack.

The underlying problem is that security awareness programs are more difficult to implement than most security professionals want to acknowledge. It requires appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities to implement a security awareness program more effectively. Organizations should consider not repeating such common mistakes to make their security awareness program successful.