Page 64 - Cyber Defense eMagazine - September 2017

Employee training: from the weakest link in a chain to your

secret weapon

By Milica D. Djekic

The modern cyber defense world would face up many challenges. For instance, it’s not an easy
thing to cope with the phishing attacks or teach your staff to gain the basic IT skills. The
technology is developing at a quite fast pace and sometimes we would wonder if we could
follow those changes. As many researchers would say the only certain stuff in the future is the
change. Being positive or negative – the experience would teach us that things would not
remain the same. We would welcome the positive changes and get somehow scared from the
negative ones. Right here, we would mention the negative social phenomena being so
interesting to defense cycles and so threatening to our progress. You would easily get that we
have in mind the threats such as organized crime, human trafficking and terrorism. The fact is
those challenges would slow down our progress and minimize the chance for sustainable
development and prosperity in the majority parts of the world. Even the most developed
economies are not immune to those security concerns. We all would remember the September
11 terrorist attacks happening in the United States in 2001. Those incidents have shaken the
leading global economy and brought the fear from getting victimized to the rest of the world.
Many years after those catastrophical events, we would hear the voice of the experts claiming
people got resilient to many threats existing today. The newest tendencies would suggest that
we could try to transform our people from being the weakest link in a chain into our secret
weapon. The fact is things would not come all at once. It would take a lot of time and effort
before we came to that phase when we can discuss such an opportunity. The role of this article
is to try to provide some findings about the modern employee trainings that could offer us more
strength in combating the global defense challenges.

At this stage, we would concentrate on some examples from a practice suggesting us how we
could deal with the cybersecurity challenges as phishing campaign is. As it’s known, the
phishing is a concern coping with the snow slip effect. In many cases, it’s sufficient to send an
ordinary email to some organization
and apparently activate the never
ending social and economical
consequences. It’s literarily as an
avalanche that would make a big
problem out of a small concern. The
practice would indicate that some
companies would invest the huge
amounts of money and effort in order
to make their employees getting
resilient to the phishing attacks. We
would find some sources claiming
that the results would be somehow
unsatisfactory. So, what is the
problem with those phishing
operations? First, we believe that the people would not get instructed well enough how serious
the impacts of clicking on such an innocent email’s link could be. If the folks got aware of their
responsibility in dealing with those small concerns – they would definitely take the different
attitude. In other words, if you try to explain to your employees that they are your first line of
defense and it’s up to them if the organization or critical infrastructure would get prevented from

64 Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2017 Edition
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