Why Your Cyber Security Will Fail Without A Strong Cyber Security Culture
Cyber Security Culture
Most organisations invest in cyber security technology, policies and training. Yet breaches still happen. Often, the issue isn’t the absence of controls, it’s that cyber security hasn’t become part of everyday decision-making and behaviour across the organisation. In other words, a strong cyber security culture is yet to be established and embedded within your team.
Without a robust cybersecurity programme, an organisation will fail to defend itself against data breaches. The impact of this could be severe financial, legal, and operational damage, devastating personal consequences for an affected individual, and irrecoverable reputational damage.
What is a cyber security culture
Cyber security culture within a work environment is a reference to the values, knowledge, behaviours, assumptions, and attitudes regarding cyber security. Most importantly, a cyber security culture is one that moves away from a checklist of completing online mandatory training, and more into the realms of shared responsibility within a company to prevent cyber-attacks from occurring inside the organisation.
Why is a cyber security culture critical?
Having a mature cyber security culture is becoming ever more critical within an organisation because employees then become the first line of defence against cyber threats, as opposed to passive contributors and potential liabilities.
This becomes increasingly important as companies continue to become more reliant on digital systems and services to conduct their work, because employees then become more at risk of breaches due to their business processes being carried out online.
Without a mature cyber security culture, breach risk to businesses will continue to increase as attacks get more sophisticated. A lack of proactivity in understanding the current risks could result in a cyber-attack simply because employees are unaware of the most up-to-date methods of attack.
For leadership teams, cyber security culture is ultimately about maintaining control, reducing risk and ensuring the organisation can continue operating confidently when threats emerge.
How to assess your cyber security culture maturity
A useful approach to assess cyber security culture is to use a five-step approach, each with advancing levels of maturity. The five stages can be split into the following categories:
Stage 1: Unaware and Unstructured
This initial stage is where a cyber security culture doesn’t exist. Within this stage there is no formal documentation or training for cyber security. Employees are unaware, and lack understanding, around the risks or types of cyber threats. Preventable mistakes are easily made at this stage because workers are unaware of how to detect possible cyber-attacks.
This stage is the most reactive, and therefore the most vulnerable. Cyber security within this phase is often only thought about after an attack has already occurred. There is also no understanding or way of identifying which employees are at the most risk or where the most vulnerable areas of the organisation are, making it difficult to implement training and improvements. This will ultimately leave an organisation vulnerable to a wide range of cyber threats.
Stage 2: Reactive and Compliance Driven
This stage has some cyber security measures, but it is more of a tick box exercise rather than proactively taking of responsibility. These are often completed to meet regulatory requirements rather than inherently trying to reduce cyber-attack risk.
The training will often be generic and not tailored towards real-world, sector specific, of employee capability-based threats. Although this stage creates awareness, it still lacks the data-driven approach needed to proactively reduce risk of cyber-attacks.
Stage 3: Structured but Siloed
This stage has a better approach and understanding of cyber security, in that there is a governance framework in place, including policies, training, and procedures to reduce cyber risk. However, this approach is still siloed in that individuals will still tick the boxes of training but will believe that overall responsibility will sit elsewhere.
Stage 4: Proactive and Measurable
The most significant distinction in moving from the first three stages into stage four is that the organisation becomes proactive, rather than reactive, regarding cyber security. A company will do this by using data to track performance and continuously refine its approach to cyber security.
Stage 5: Predictive and Embedded
The final stage of cyber security culture maturity is when it becomes a core value that is deeply embedded across the organisation. Employees are proactive in their security, and actively champion good practices, and maintain current knowledge within the cyber security sphere.
Understanding your current level of cyber culture maturity gives you a clearer starting point. It helps leaders identify where risk sits today, where capability gaps exist and where to prioritise effort rather than relying on broad awareness campaigns alone.
How you can start to increase the maturity of your company’s cyber security culture
To start driving change and increase the cyberculture of your company, there is a four-step process that can be used:
Step 1: Have a culture owner
Enlist someone within the company, who is non-technical, to drive behaviour change, values, and beliefs, within the organisation towards cyber security.
Step 2: Don’t use technical jargon, use language that resonates
It is important to use language that the company will understand, and that resonates with individuals. There is no point in using technical language that will get lost or lose interest in the targeted audience. By using language that your employees can engage with, you are more likely to get them invested in the overall objective of making the company’s data and practices more secure.
Step 3: Consider how cyber security behaviours are reflected in development conversations, objectives and recognition programmes.
Evaluating employees on their cyber security competence within performance review periods will aid in keeping it at the forefront of their everyday ways of working. This can also be coupled with rewards if someone is championing cyber security within the organisation above what is expected of them, and their objectives can be temporarily directed in a cyber security direction if they are continually failing breach exercises.
Step 4: Have consistent periods of exercises and cyber-attack drills
Have planned periods of simulating cyber-attacks and send out phishing content to then report the results to employees. This would be like having a planned fire drill. It would keep cyber security at the front of people’s minds and give them a process to follow if a cyber-attack ever occurs. By having sporadic phishing emails and other cyber-attack exercises being presented to employees, it encourages them to stay vigilant throughout the year.
Building a stronger cyber security culture is about creating shared accountability so that cyber security becomes part of how decisions are made and work gets done. Organisations that achieve this are often better placed to manage risk, maintain operational confidence and respond effectively as threats continue to evolve. Want to chat? Get in touch with one of our cyber security and culture change experts today!
