3 Part Series Written by Tim Watrous – President Digital Advisors
Part 2 – Embracing your inner skeptic!
In the last three years the federal government provided unprecedented stimulus funding to give us access to more devices in more places than we’ve ever had before. This post COVID era offers us expanded opportunities to connect, learn, and work anywhere anytime. However, one unfortunate side effect is the exponential increase in the number of opportunities for cyber-attacks, which is why we have seen school districts become such a popular target for hackers in recent years.
With all of this in mind where do we start our journey to improve our cybersecurity posture and digital hygiene? Let’s start with the biggest area we can all impact: It’s time to embrace our inner skeptic!
One of the most powerful tools you can leverage to protect your digital identities and keep your districts data safe is cyber security awareness training. If you have ever attended a cyber security training you will remember being taught to look for things that seem suspicious, or too good to be true. You were encouraged to question all the links in emails from untrusted sources and to only click on links that you are reasonably certain are legitimate. We need to nurture this increased level of skepticism in our personal and professional lives to navigate the digital threats we face today.
As a business leader you may be asking, how do we measure our level of skepticism? Fortunately, there is a metric commonly used in the cybersecurity realm known as a Phishing score.
If you don’t know what Phishing or for that matter what a phishing score is this should be cause for concern.
Phishing is a type of attack used by cybercriminals to trick you into clicking on a modified link, giving them the opportunity to launch an attack against you or your district. A phishing score is the percentage of users who click on a malicious email sent to them. For example, if 25 out of 100 users click on an email with a subject line such as “You won a $25 Starbucks card for being a wonderful employee,” which is actually malicious, your score would be 25%. Common subject lines that often have a high click rate include “Updated vacation policy” and “Payroll has been delayed.” Ideally, your score should be closer to 3%.
Ultimately the single biggest threat to our digital identities and digital health is human behavior. Despite having the fanciest security equipment and most elaborate software, if you don’t address how people behave while accessing your devices and resources on your network, you will still be at great risk for a cyber-attack.
This is the second in a series of three articles on cyber security for CASBO, and in the final article I will provide additional specifics on improving your digital hygiene and protecting your digital identity. For more information, please register for our upcoming webinar. We will hear from experts and dive deeper into what leaders need to know to improve cyber security, digital health, and hygiene in this new landscape of digital threats that we all live in today.