Let us uncover the answer to the question, “Why are humans the weakest link in cybersecurity?”
Read on to find out.
Are humans really the weakest link in cybersecurity?
One of the most common arguments you hear from security experts is that humans are the weakest link in cybersecurity.
This is true, but it’s not because people are inherently bad or incapable of doing their jobs. It’s because a lot of them are incentivized to make poor decisions or no decisions at all.
The biggest problem with the human factor is that it’s very hard to make security a competitive differentiator for any business.
At the most basic level, there are only two ways to improve your cybersecurity: You can make it harder for hackers to get in.
Or you can set up systems that will identify when breaches occur and help you deal with them quickly.
But both of these approaches require investments of time and money. And, of course, businesses have limited budgets.
Your employees are the weakest link in your cybersecurity chain
Since it’s hard to make security a selling point for a business, you need to think about cybersecurity as an expense.
And like any business expense, the people responsible for making security decisions are largely motivated by their own bottom lines.
They want to do everything they can to protect your business, but they also want to make sure that their own jobs are secure.
And so when you ask your employees about cybersecurity, you’re getting their perspectives on just two things: how much work is involved and how much it costs.
Neither of these things has any direct relationship with how secure your company is.
Most of the time, cybersecurity breaches happen because of a single click from your employee.
With all of these pressures and incentives, it’s easy to understand why most cybersecurity breaches happen because of a single click from your employee.
According to Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report, about 60 percent of breaches happen because of some kind of human error.
And half of them occur because an employee clicked on a malicious link or opened up an email attachment.
So many companies have started to focus on training employees to be more security-minded. They give them information about the latest viruses and teach them how to avoid phishing emails and other common hacks.
This approach is helpful in the short term, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem: Your employees are still incentivized to do whatever will make their jobs easiest.
What You Can Do
Ask yourself, “What can you do as a CISO that will get your employees’ attention?”
You need a solution that makes cybersecurity as easy and obvious as possible for your employees. So, they can focus on the stuff that really matters like delivering great products and services.
You can’t rely on your employees to protect you against cyberattacks if you don’t let them see the threats in the first place.
And that’s exactly what traditional endpoint protection solutions do. They keep attackers hidden from your employees.
