3 Important Tips for Effective Employee Security Awareness

These days, every organization has a security program to protect themselves from escalating attacks with growing sophistication. And while much of the focus centers on defending against outsider threats, an equally important component of any security effort is safeguarding against insider threats through effective employee awareness.

Maybe your organization is already aware of all this—maybe you’ve already trained employees on proper security protocols and made sure to update everyone on any changes to threats or procedures. But with the aforementioned escalation of threats, some extra insight might be nice and as cybersecurity experts, we can help.

In this blog post, we’ll dive more into why security awareness remains so critical before providing some helpful tips to boost the effectiveness of your existing security awareness programs.

The Importance of Security Awareness Among Your Employees

As important as fortifying your defenses against the outside world is, the statistics speak for themselves— employee-triggered incidents remain a significant cybersecurity issue and account for a considerable portion of data breaches.

More specifically, Verizon’s 2023 Data Breach Investigations report found that 74% of all data breaches involved some form of interface with an employee, and the fact is, your people can inadvertently—and at times deliberately—threaten your cybersecurity in several ways:

• Insider Threats: Yes, employees may choose to intentionally leak sensitive company information for various reasons.

• Human Error: More commonly, employees will make inadvertent mistakes—such as misconfiguring systems, ignoring security patches, improperly disposing of data, mishandling devices, using weak passwords, etc.

• Falling Victim to Phishing Attacks: Phishing continues to be a preferred weapon of choice for many cybercriminals, and that’s likely because people keep falling for this social engineering—according to a 2024 report by Egress, there’s been a 28% increase in phishing emails sent just this year, and those numbers will likely continue to grow and have more success as tactics diversify and with AI making impersonation of legitimate contacts even more possible.

How to Effectively Promote Security Awareness Among Your Employees

Given all this, organizations everywhere are at a critical junction with their cybersecurity. Protecting yourself must include building and fortifying a strong foundational awareness among all your employees so that they can more easily detect outside threats and avoid making the careless mistakes attackers can leverage.

Here are some things your organization can do to directly curate and continuously support security-savvy staff.

1. Perform Required, Regular, and Comprehensive Security Training Programs.

Your people can’t defend against what they don’t know or understand, so education is, of course, paramount in promoting security awareness within your organization.

This education should include information about current and evolving threats such as phishing/social engineering attacks and ransomware, but here are some further specifics to consider regarding cybersecurity training:

• Role-Specific Instruction: All employees—regardless of department or relation to sensitive data—should receive security training, but you should also tailor programs to the risks associated with each employee's responsibilities and access levels.
  • E.g., employees in HR or finance—who are more likely to handle sensitive data—might receive more specialized training than others, whereas your executives and IT staff should undergo more rigorous testing due to their more extensive access to all of it.

• Asset-Specific Instruction: While general security awareness training is helpful, your company likely holds specific assets that could be particularly threatened by a malicious action or employee mistake—in the same way you might tailor security training to roles, you might also align training around these specific assets.
  • E.g., if you own a proprietary software platform, you might curate parts of your security programs around its specific vulnerabilities.
• Phishing Simulations: It’s not enough to just inform your people about potential attack vectors—to supplement that education, conduct mock campaigns to test how your people respond to phishing attempts so that they can gain real experience in recognizing these fraudulent attacks so that they can better avoid what can potentially be devastating consequences.
  • E.g., you might send an email mimicking an urgent request from a manager to test whether employees verify the legitimacy before clicking any links or attachments. (You might also bring in a third-party firm to perform more extensive social engineering campaigns to test your employees.)
• Incident Response Drills: Similarly, you should regularly create and practice mock breach scenarios that test whether your employees act swiftly in response to security issues and according to protocol to mitigate damage—these drills should include all departments so that everyone understands their responsibilities in containing a potential breach.
  • E.g., You—or an external cybersecurity firm—could simulate a ransomware attack to test how quickly your staff identifies and isolates affected systems, which could help you discover vulnerabilities that still need shoring up.

Simulations, as well as interactive training tools—like quizzes, games, or hands-on workshops—will engage employees and reinforce security lessons effectively, making it more likely they maintain heightened vigilance. But training shouldn’t be a one-off, either.

Not only should you make security education regular, with updated threat information and potential attack tactics, but have those employees who fall for your simulations attend refresher courses. Moreover, take steps to reward those who successfully pass—as well as those who proactively report real security threats—to further encourage vigilance.

2. Review (or Establish) Clear Security Policies—Then Make a Point to Communicate Them Often.

A robust education program is critically important for any organization, but to further support employee security awareness—and reduce the risk of data breaches—you should also ensure your security policies are simple, communicated openly, and enforced.

In this digital and compliance-forward age, it’s likely your organization has already established procedures regarding handling sensitive data, using secure passwords, and identifying potential threats, among other things.

But when reviewing or updating them—as you should be doing regularly—here are two key questions to revisit and answer:

• Are your policies straightforward? To make sure such critical information is accessible to all, avoid overly complex jargon in policies—write them so that anyone can easily understand your organization’s expectations for their role in data handling, how they should approach password creation, and proper channels for secure communication.
• Have you communicated your security policies clearly and to everyone? While the PCI Security Standards Council recommends using the communication channel that best fits your organization’s culture to distribute content about your security program, using multiple channels could also help ensure your employees are exposed to the information many times in many ways—increasing the likelihood they’ll retain the information.

• Consider maintaining accessible resources like an intranet portal or FAQ section where staff can easily find cybersecurity policies, along with "what to do" guides for suspected breaches.

Communication regarding security also shouldn’t just be limited to your policies—consider sharing periodic updates on emerging threats with reminders about best practices through newsletters, intranet posts, or webinars.

3. Leverage Technology Where Possible to Support Your Employees in Safeguarding Your Organization

Together with simplified policies, technology can also help ease the burden of security awareness on your employees. Tools like these can help catch and mitigate some potential threats (sometimes even before they even reach the point where your people have to judge their legitimacy):

• Enhanced and Specific Authentication Methods:
  • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): MFA—because it requires multiple forms of verification to access systems—can help reduce an attacker’s further penetration of your network even if an employee initially falls for a phishing attack.
    
    
  • Risk-Based Authentication (RBA): Unlike MFA, RBA requires additional verification steps only when risks are detected, which the technology determines by assessing the location, device, or time of the login attempt.
    
    
  • Phishing-Resistant Authentication: Hardware security keys or FIDO2 authentication standards ensure credentials cannot be intercepted or reused so that even if someone accidentally interacts with a phishing email, the credentials they provide the hacker with are tied to specific domains and are therefore useless.
• Password Management Tools: Employees will often opt for passwords that are easy to remember but are also easy for attackers to crack—but if they could store all their passwords in an encrypted vault, it would pave the way for your people to instead create strong, unique passwords, as they wouldn’t have to remember or reuse credentials.

  • Other options that would help safeguard your organization and employees against password vulnerabilities include:

    • §  Single Sign-On (SSO):
    • §  Biometric Authentication
    • §  Behavioral Biometrics
• Email and Browser Security Plugins: Tools like Mimecast or Proofpoint will detect and warn users about suspicious links or websites in real time.

Keep Your Organization Safe

Organizations must commit to promoting security awareness among all their staff in order to protect themselves against increasingly clever attacks. Taking a multifaceted approach—as we’ve laid out here —will create a resilient workforce capable of defending against accidental and deliberate security breaches.

As you consider how to now move forward in fortifying this aspect of your cybersecurity, you should know that Schellman can help. We offer a large catalog of training programs that can be delivered in a few different ways, including these on-demand options:

• Security Awareness Basics: In covering two of the most dangerous cyber threats to any organization—malware and phishing—this course details the importance of being “security aware” and making safe, security-conscious decisions on a day-to-day basis.
  
  
• Security Awareness Essentials: Learn the fundamentals of information security, including key threats and how to counter them so that you can successfully defend personal and workplace data from malicious threats.
  
  
• Security Awareness for Executives and Managers: Developed for those who supervise employees, this course will introduce concepts and techniques to aid managers in developing staff into a security-savvy workforce.

To learn more about these CPE-eligible trainings and how our cybersecurity experts can educate your employees on how best to defend and respond to attacks, contact us today.