Your Biggest Cybersecurity Risk: Your Untrained Employees

Cyber criminals work round the clock to detect and exploit vulnerabilities in your business’ network for nefarious gains. The only way to counter these hackers is by deploying a robust cybersecurity posture that’s built using comprehensive security solutions. However, while you’re caught up doing this, there is a possibility you may overlook mitigating the biggest cybersecurity risk in your fight against cyber criminals — your untrained employees.

With remote work gaining traction and decentralized work spaces becoming the new norm, businesses like yours must strengthen their cybersecurity strategies to counter human errors and data breaches perpetrated by malicious insiders. All employees, irrespective of their designation/rank, can expose your business vulnerabilities to cyber criminals.

Implementing routine security awareness training for employees can help you prevent a vulnerability from escalating into a disaster. As the first line of defense against cyber attacks, your employees must be thoroughly and regularly trained to identify and deflate potential cyber threats. With proper security training you can turn your business’ biggest cybersecurity risk into its most important asset.

Why Employees Pose a Risk to Businesses?

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020, 23% of data breaches in an organization occurred because of human error. An untrained employee can compromise your business’ security in multiple ways. Some of the most common errors committed by employees include:

1. Falling for phishing scams: With the onset of COVID-19, hackers masquerading as the World Health Organization (WHO) tricked people into clicking on malicious links and sharing sensitive information. Cyber criminals are using improved techniques, like spoofed emails and text messages, to propagate the ongoing scam. Your employees must be well-trained to counter it.

2. Bad password hygiene: A section of your employees might reuse the same password or a set of passwords for multiple accounts (business and personal), which is a dangerous habit that allows cyber criminals to crack your business’ network security.

3. Misdelivery: Even slight carelessness can lead to an employee sending sensitive, business-critical information to a hacker. Such an act can cause lasting damage to your business, which is why you must be prepared to counter it.

4. Inept patch management: Often, employees can delay the deployment of a security patch sent to their device, which can lead to security vulnerabilities in your business’ IT security left unaddressed.

The bottom line is that with cyber criminals upgrading their arsenal every day and exploring a plethora of options to trap your employees, security awareness training has become more important than ever before.

Security Awareness Training: An Essential Investment

A one-time training program will neither help your employees repel cyber threats nor help your business develop a security culture. To deal with the growing threat landscape, your employees need thorough and regular security awareness training.

You must never back out of providing continual security awareness training to your employees just because of the time and money you need to invest in it. The return on investment will be visible in the form of better decision-making employees who efficiently respond in the face of adversity, ultimately saving your business from data breaches, damage to reputation and potentially expensive lawsuits.

The following statistics highlight why you must deploy regular security awareness training and consider it a necessary investment:

– Eighty percent of organizations experience at least one compromised account threat per month.

– Sixty-seven percent of data breaches result from human error, credential theft or social attack.

– Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, phishing attacks have gone up by 67 percent.

Expecting your employees to train themselves on how to detect and respond to cyber threats certainly isn’t the best way to deal with an ever-evolving threat landscape. You must take on the responsibility of providing regular training to your employees to ensure you adequately prepare them to identify and ward off potential cyber attacks.

Every employee must realize that even a minor mistake can snowball into a terrible security disaster for the company. They need to understand that your business’ cybersecurity is also their responsibility.

You can transform your business’ biggest cybersecurity risk – your employees – into its prime defense against threats by developing a security culture that emphasizes adequate and regular security awareness training.

Your Employees Can Become Your Strongest Security Asset

Cybercriminals often target employees because people are frequently easier to exploit than technology. Phishing attacks, social engineering schemes, weak passwords, and simple mistakes continue to contribute to many successful cybersecurity incidents.

The good news is that these risks can be significantly reduced when organizations invest in ongoing security awareness, clear policies, employee accountability, and a culture that encourages secure decision-making. Employees who understand how to recognize threats and respond appropriately become an active part of the organization’s defense strategy rather than a potential vulnerability.

Security awareness is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process that strengthens over time through training, reinforcement, leadership support, and continuous improvement.

Organizations that prioritize employee education are often better positioned to reduce risk, improve compliance outcomes, and strengthen overall cybersecurity resilience.

Is Your Workforce Prepared to Recognize Today’s Cyber Threats?

Many organizations provide security training but never evaluate whether employees are applying what they learn consistently in their day-to-day activities. If you’d like help strengthening your security culture and reducing human-related cyber risk, schedule a free consultation with ITNS Consulting.

We’ll help assess your current awareness efforts, identify opportunities for improvement, and develop a practical strategy that supports employee accountability, cybersecurity readiness, and long-term organizational resilience.

How Mature Is Your Security and Compliance Program?

Security awareness training is most effective when it is supported by strong governance, accountability, policies, and continuous improvement.

Download our Compliance Program Maturity Scorecard to evaluate your organization’s current cybersecurity and compliance efforts, identify opportunities for improvement, and gain a clearer understanding of your overall governance, risk management, and compliance maturity.