Building a Security Awareness Program for Small Businesses

InfoSec Institute is dedicated to increasing security awareness and has an enormous repository of information to help individuals, small- and mid-sized businesses and enterprises to increase their security awareness.

In this article, we are going to focus on building a security awareness program for small businesses in-house and making it fun.

Spend money on teaching people not to click on suspicious links? You’ve got to be kidding me!

No. Between 43 percent and 70 percent of cyber-attacks are aimed at small businesses. In 2017, the cost to an SMB was, on average, $2,235,000. Depleting their capital to clean up the mess, up to 60 percent of SMBs shut down within six months of an attack.

Before we begin: Are you actually a small business?

Use the Small Business Administration’s online tool to find out.

An SMB (aka SME) is usually considered a business with up to 500 employees, although revenue, assets and industry are considered, and this figure may be as high as 1500. With a small workforce, SMBs have the opportunity to innovate security awareness strategies in a way many large conglomerates often can’t do due to logistical difficulties and costs.

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7 Creative and Practical Security Awareness Ideas That Can Also Add Business Value

1. Stay informed at home, at work and in the chill room

Colorful, informative posters catch people’s eyes, particularly when they are packed with interesting or startling statistics. InfoSec Institute has a collection of 30 security infographics to download and decorate the office with messages that make people think about security.

2. Use a carrot, not a stick

An information security student carried out an experiment to discover whether positive inducements could tempt users in a particular department at a company to properly log off their mainframe terminals. Open sessions were disrupting operations and posed (Read more...)