With the New Year comes a fresh start.
For most firms, the beginning of the year is often the busiest. Around this time, some firms are going through the hiring process and introducing their new employees to their systems, business model and operations.
A critical step within cybersecurity is employee security lifecycle.
The employee security lifecycle starts way before the employee is hired with defined roles and responsibilities. Defined roles and responsibilities are essential to identifying the reporting structure. Reporting structure leads to mitigating essential security controls; identity and authentication management, access control, to name a few.
After finalizing the job description and reporting structure have been identified, finding the ideal candidate is the goal. During this stage background checks are essential. Here firms can weed out any potential bad apples.
Onboarding new employees means introducing them to the layout of the firm, the internal structure, operation, policies, and most important security awareness training. New employees come with their own security handicap, so training them early is vital to conveying security awareness is top priority. Also during onboarding, the leg work that has been done ahead of time can now benefit the employee as they are introduced to systems, programs, and their task.
Personnel security, privacy, and physical environmental protection are all equally critical prevention methods around the onboarding stage and throughout the employee’s internal mobility.
As the employee develops their skills, it is vital for department heads, HR and IT to access whether changes need to be made to their security posture.
Ongoing awareness training is critical. Employees should have multiple awareness training that is both general in nature as well as specific to the individuals’ role.
Upon receiving the intent to separate, firms should take steps to revisit the employees’ security lifecycle to assess the critical controls to restrict or phase out.
This preceding step is as necessary as all the other steps. A properly structured termination phase can make a grave difference in your cyber resiliency. Take for instance the Capital One breach; an incident caused by a former Amazon employee who retained access to certain systems she used to source personal identifiable information of clients of Capital One and other companies.
Take the time to understand your employees’ security lifecycle and you will improve your cybersecurity landscape.
Reach out to CybSecWatch for tips to strengthen your new hire Security Awareness program today.