As is custom for SPS, we participate in October National Cybersecurity Month. Each week during the month here at SPS is filled with a plethora of updated content which is distributed across multiple channels to reach every employee. Core concepts and emerging threats like ransomware are covered. New this year was an increased emphasis and focus on personal security.
As our traditional office perimeter has been swapped for the familiarity of home, the lines between ‘personal security’ and ‘best security practices at work’ has also dissolved. Common threats like phishing, password hacking, and data handling remain. Welcome personal home router security, man-in-the-middle attacks through Wi-Fi, and physical asset theft to the stage.
Topics like piggybacking (where someone without access – or without a badge – follows a person with access into an area) once again become increasingly relevant, with a new spin. With many employees going to the office only occasionally, between the passage of time and new employees, there are faces employees may not recognize. This increases the need for each employee to badge in when they come to the office. Additionally, accurate employee counts help employers to adjust operations to meet requirements or needs under Covid.
Blurring the lines between home and work has also provided the opportunity to focus on real-life examples in and outside the office. At SPS, we used gamification to engage employees for the 2021 annual cyber security awareness training module. This module is developed in-house with the content aligned to address SPS’s risk profile, relevant to our business, and representative to our culture. Characters in our training content represented scenarios for working in the home office, in a virtual meeting room, or from within a coffee shop. This provided the opportunity to target our training to address common threats from where, and how, employees will actually encounter them in today’s working environment.
The last year and a half has helped to evolve the face of security awareness by introducing more opportunities to emphasize secure behaviors across technology both at work and home. At SPS, employees come first. Security is also part of who we are. October National Cybersecurity Month continues to provide us an opportunity to win today, and win tomorrow. We do this through continued education and a dedication to keeping all the data we have and are trusted with both at work and home, safe and secure.
