02 Aug 6 Signs of a Successfull Security Culture
Security culture is much more than just IT policies and procedures. It requires buy-in and participation from every user. So, how do you know if you’re on the right path to building a security awareness culture?
Culture is defined by ISACA as “a pattern of behaviors, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and ways of doing things.” So, let’s break down this definition and apply it explicitly to security culture. Let’s take a closer look at what a security culture should look like and whether you have one in place.
- Belief
Organizations that want to succeed in forming a security culture have to educate their users to the point where users believe that their participation in security is essential to the success of the organization. Without belief, there is no adoption, and without user adoption, the culture is dead.
- Attitude
Users can believe, but users need to act upon that belief. Users should want to assist with doing their best to secure the organization, rather than seeing it as an annoyance.
- Assumption
You can tell the user is security minded when they follow the guidelines when opening emails, visiting web pages, clicking links, opening attachments, and resetting password. There needs to be an assumption that every action taken by users is taken with certainty that what their interacting with is legitimate.
- Behavior
Users who have bought into the security culture begin to change the way they act by being less impulsive with clicking, checking domain names and email addresses for validity, and verifying interactions with users and clients.
- Pattern
The goal is to have users perform security-related tasks consistently for your organization and clients.
- Action
Users take purposeful steps to uphold culture principles and maintain the state of security.
Establishing a security culture involves retraining your users on how to do their job with security in mind. Security awareness training helps reinforce both security culture principles and best practices that can be applied daily.
Contact us to learn how we can help use security awareness training to help retrain user thinking by making users a part of the culture.