Time to Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Culture and How to Measure its Effectiveness
Creating and maintaining a corporate culture that helps to safeguard the assets to ensure everyday business operations is not easy. Research has shown that many companies overestimate how secure their companies and assets are. Are you confident that your cybersecurity culture is strong when we randomly pull out of any employee and ask a few security-awareness questions? In this article, we will define and discuss what makes a good security culture and the steps to ensure a viable security culture in every corner of the company since it is an ongoing job. Security preparedness depends on everyone's participation, on every level of processes, and the awareness of technology vulnerabilities. At last, we will give you information on how you can quantify and measure the strength of your cybersecurity culture.
What is a cybersecurity culture?
Cybersecurity culture is the social behavior and norms found in the workplace that promote the awareness and practice of safeguarding all company assets including people, data, technology, and process. One must distinguish between an IT's security program, and a cybersecurity culture is two different things. A security program involves planned security tasks, such as planning meetings, security strategies, and scheduled security tasks that aim to maintain the overall health of the company's security. Cybersecurity culture is about everyone playing an active role in defending cybersecurity threats that harm their companies. Anyone in the company should be able to ask any security-related questions and concerns and seek answers with the cybersecurity experts. Only when people start to question and want to know more about cybersecurity on their own, the company begins to have a true cybersecurity culture.
Steps to establishing a success cybersecurity culture
Establishing a cybersecurity culture involves everyone's participation and actively seeking answers about cybersecurity. This includes everyone from executives to field workers. Here are the steps to build a healthy cybersecurity culture:
1. Develop a cybersecurity culture from top to bottom
If the executives in the upper management do not possess the necessary cybersecurity knowledge and are not serious about security, you cannot expect the employees to be serious as well. If you thought cybersecurity is the sole responsibility of the IT group, your organization is immediately at risk in cybersecurity. The upper management must allocate sufficient resources and budget in the organization to kick off the cybersecurity culture. Additional personnel and support should also be allocated to the IT group.
2. Set the example
The IT department should set the example and lead the organization's cybersecurity culture. Don't assume everyone working in the IT group possess the necessary cybersecurity knowledge since they work with IT every day. The IT group first needs to establish its own cybersecurity culture and have plans on educating and implementing security policy into every level of IT tasks. Routine security protocol and periodic re-examining security procedures may be easy when you have an excellent SOP in place.
In contrast to IT infrastructure, if you have a development team in the group, you need to implement a different strategy to take care of potential cybersecurity issues. The areas are coding, software architecture, and deployment. In every development area, we need to establish a way to ensure security concerns are addressed in every development phase. If you use an agile development tool, you can add a cybersecurity workflow into a user story template. So every developer can follow the standards and best practices to prevent vulnerabilities in their applications.
Since cybersecurity is an ongoing task, developers must keep up with their knowledge in the area of cybersecurity as well. Over the years of software consulting and development, I have seen so many security issues still existed in the codes. Many developers are only worried about the functionalities of their software. They often overlooked the security of the software since many often lack cybersecurity knowledge and are unaware of how they can impact the organization's business.
Before the IT group can spread the gospel of cybersecurity, the IT group needs to educate themselves first. Once the IT group has strengthened its cybersecurity culture, their enthusiasm and confidence will motivate the rest of the organization.
3. Empowering everyone in the organization
Organizations should establish ways to encourage employees to question and be diligent about their works that improve overall cybersecurity health. We can start with security awareness training and workshops. For example, we can ask employees to write their own versioned phishing emails. In this way, the better they can understand the behaviors of the attackers, the better we can defend our cyberspace together. It is a joint effort, not just the responsibilities of a few. Employees can also learn about the business impact of cyberattacks, and careless mistakes of personnel could cause devastating results, especially working at a healthcare organization. Organizations can help to launch cybersecurity awareness seminars in brown bag lunches and reward employees with cybersecurity best practice or tip. The organization needs to encourage employees to become a more in-depth expert on cybersecurity continually. Cybersecurity culture is not about passive participation. Instead, creating a positive, no blame culture is vital to the success of establishing cybersecurity culture.
4. Make learning about cybersecurity fun
Although keeping cybersecurity involves everyone, the ultimate responsibilities of the overall cybersecurity health lie in upper management. The organization must initialize with a real and inspiring vision that keeps up with cybersecurity standards and knowledge. Using a fun and engaging approach is a realistic option. The company can create online surveys and trivia games surrounding topics about cybersecurity. From 2019, many companies started to utilize gamification strategies to enhance the cybersecurity training program since many find it helps engagement and motivation to learn things. By using the fun elements of game-playing, educating employees can have a fun and exciting experience. Rewarding-based techniques can also be helpful and creative. The company can even send out "test" phishing emails, and the staff that does not fall for the trap can receive rewards.
5. Personalize the cybersecurity culture
Organizations should motivate people at every level since every action we make could have a security impact. Activities could be as simple as leaving laptops unattended to clicking on the suspicious email or a web page from the Internet, which may create devastating results. To make cybersecurity a personalizing thing, organizations should help people understand how compromised credentials, cookies, ransomware, malware, and other cyber-attack targets could impact their personal lives and their families. People should establish the same high-security standard at home or work because cyber threats could come from anywhere. We can also share with everyone on how we protect our family members from cyber threats. This is especially true when many people are working from home during the COVID-19 period.
How to measure the strength of your cybersecurity culture
Establishing a metric that quantifies the strength of the cybersecurity culture could be a daunting task. Still, it is a doable thing if you lay out the cybersecurity coverage of the network. You can divide the coverage into four areas: people, data, processes, and technology.
In each area, the organization can devise a list of questions and vulnerabilities that you can ask or measure. For example, under the people area, you can develop a list of the latest questionnaires that measure awareness among employees and managers. We can focus on specific security policies and procedures. You can also collect data count on security incidents, neglect or carelessness incidents, and incident discoveries. People can use this opportunity to alert any anomalies to their supervisors.
The challenges of measuring the cybersecurity culture do not lie in the methodology. In an ever-changing environment, gauging the strength of cybersecurity preparedness needs to keep evolving and adjusting for measuring its effectiveness. Yesterday's best practices may become today's vulnerabilities. People's perception and behavior could change. Methods of cyberattacks are changing periodically. The true strength of cybersecurity culture is coming within. When people are excited about defending their cyberspace, a strong culture can discover loopholes before becoming security issues. People would be on the constant lookout for cyber threats and thus prevent cyberattacks.
The cybersecurity culture is just like in medicine; prevention is the Best Medicine. Establishing a true cybersecurity culture can turn everyone into a cyber defender of the cyber universe!
Why not make it fun and engageable when everyone can beat the bad guys and help the big family safe from cyberthreats?
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