Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
How The Human Element Of Cybersecurity Could Be Affecting Your Business
Show Notes
Caitriona Forde has more than 20 years of experience in the IT sector and specialises in cyber security. She is the founder of CaIT – a cybersecurity consulting firm that operates in Australia. She We offer a premium cybersecurity awareness and training programs for all levels of staff from different industries. She believe that too many small and medium-scale businesses suffer from the lack of cyber education in Australia and beyond. Her programs help organisations build cyber-safe behaviors and develop a culture of cyber awareness. She works with solopreneurs, not-for-profits, small to medium size businesses, and large enterprises.
The Importance of Cyber Security
When you set up a business, the first thing you think about is how to get an email account and a website and all these things to get the business off the ground and then the security side of it is normally an afterthought. Often times, people sending passwords through emails and even the whole bank details and credit cards. Unfortunately, doing this is not safe at all. You see, one of the most common reason your cybersecurity could be compromised is because of human element.
When you get some problem regarding your online business, you’re going to do whatever it takes to make it work, whether it is with someone safe or not. For small business owners, they might not be able to afford to pay for an IT professional to help with this situation especially because of the challenging economic time. Chances are, they go on to Google and try and find a solution. And that might not be the most secure solution.
When you grow a team for your business, some of them could be doing risky behaviors are risky tasks and unknowns to yourself. Business owner might think this is what’s happening in the business, but then when you open the hood and you start to look under, maybe the business owner was away on holidays and the staff needed a workaround. So they find a workaround because they didn’t want to trouble their boss while they’re on holidays. And this is what leads to businesses getting hacked. Unfortunately, this is a common scenario on small businesses.
What is Human Element?
A person’s emotion might contribute to human element. For example, when you are stressed, you will not be the easiest person to come and ask for some questions. When your team member has made a mistake, they might not want to come to you in times of your stress as you might snap at them or you will not be that approachable at all.
That’s human nature. You know, that’s how we are, especially when we’re working towards deadlines. We all have stress. And if we don’t create an environment where they feel safe to speak up, are safe to report any mistake they did, the mistake can be brushed under the carpet and that mistake can then be the reason why as a business can get hacked.
When you don’t talk about that mistake, that could lead to something serious. It’s probably one of the advantages that the hackers have against us is that they know that sometimes, we don’t want to speak up when we make a mistake as part of human nature. We don’t want to be in the wrong, we don’t want to make mistakes. You know, we always want to be right and we always want to be doing things right.
We always want to impressed our boss or impressing whoever we work for. And hackers know that we will then maybe sometimes try and hide our mistakes, which then gives them the leverage to do the nasty things that they do.
Links
How The Human Element Of Cybersecurity Could Be Affecting Your Business
Cybersecurity is something that everybody should take care of and we all need to work on this together. It is not an IT. It’s not a cyber team’s problem. It’s something that we all need to learn to uplift our skills to keep the whole world safe, not just our businesses and ourselves.
Listen to the full episode of Small Business Talk episode 202.
You can also find the video versions of the Small Business Talk Episodes on YouTube.
