Staying safe online
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month – an international campaign which raises awareness of how to protect yourself from online threats. The theme of this year’s event is ‘Stay Safe Online’ and it emphasises four actions that are vital to strengthening defences:
- Use strong passwords and a password manager
- Protect your systems with multifactor authentication
- Identify scams and report them
- Make sure software is up to date.
One of the most common factors in security breaches is crooks exploiting human behaviour. The CIEHF has produced a white paper exploring how human factors thinking can help increase a business’s defences against these threats and protect their data and systems.
The guide, called The role of human factors in delivering cyber security, promotes a holistic systems perspective which takes account of the people within organisations. It aims to give an understanding of human factors cyber security considerations and is designed to help organisational decision makers incorporate human factors into cyber security.
It says: “Many incidents have been attributed to the human element. However, mature organisations recognise that systemic failures are usually the cause of incidents. It is also important to recognise that the human element can strengthen cyber security and although defences are engineered, their integrity is human mediated.”
The guide free to download from our website, where you can also find our Human Affected Cyber Security Framework. This white paper outlines seven types of risky behaviour, their causes and how to tackle them.
