Are you aware of the importance of cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is a big deal to every company, at this point — not just the tech world.

So it’s alarming to hear that 95% of the global cybersecurity incidents noted by the World Economic Forum were caused by human error — in other words, employees within a company divulging sensitive data or content to the wrong people.

In reviewing Thales’ 2022 Data Threat Report, Stu Sjouwerman, SACP CEO of local unicorn KnowBe4, found key data points around awareness of the problem of users:

• Human error is seen as the highest threat to organizational security with 38% of organizations ranking it as the top threat.
• 29% of organizations ranked “accidental human error” as the top threat
• 79% of organizations are concerned about the security risks with an increasingly remote workforce

Most often, it’s a mistake: an employee is lured by a phishing scam into handing over keys to bad actors. Other times, cyber theft is intentionally orchestrated by people from within a company or who have left but still have data and content permissions.

But do companies put too much priority on data walking out the door? As Sjouwerman puts it “It seems like the focus is way too much on trying to prevent data from leaving, instead of stopping attackers from ever getting in.

Most organizations house a lot of sensitive vendor, client & employee data. For these organizations which are on the hook to abide by strict regulations, cybersecurity is a critical thing. The companies I work with take this matter quite seriously.

One thing is for sure. It only takes one bad actor — or one person’s mistake — to really screw up a company’s regulatory compliance or the very foundations of its business.

#cybersecurity #securedata #cybersecuritytraining