Hopefully anybody who has paid attention to the presidential race appreciates that cyberattacks are not only a threat to the most powerful people in the world.
If anything, the ease with which hackers have infiltrated sensitive emails sent by top-level government officials should be a wake-up call to employers who have not trained their workers on how to protect themselves and their employers from hacking.
While hacking can be the result of sophisticated infiltrations of network systems, in many cases it is simply caused by careless or uninformed employees who don't take basic precautions to protect themselves from cyberattacks.
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In a new report on cybersecurity in the workplace, the Chatsworth, California-based Identity Management Institute warns employers to spend less time on network security and put more emphasis on teaching workers best practices about protecting their digital information.
"The main reason why we ignore the reports which point to human error as the main root cause of data breaches is the belief that only network security can stop hackers in the Internet world. This is not an accurate assessment because as organizations excessively fortify their network security with intrusion detection and prevention technology, data breach incidents continue to rise," says Henry Bagdasarian, the organization's founder, in a press release.
The good news is that the high-profile cyberattacks that have made the news have raised awareness among the general public. A survey of 3,779 employees between the ages of 18-26 in a dozen countries commissioned by Raytheon and the National Cyber Security Alliance finds a dramatic increase in the number of young people who are aware of hacking threats as well as a rise in interest among young people in pursuing a career in cybersecurity.
The study also reveals a troubling gender gap in terms of awareness of hacking threats and interest in jobs related to cybersecurity.
Fifty-nine percent of men age 18-26 say they received former cybersecurity training at work, up from 43 percent last year. Among women in the same age group, 53 percent received training, up from 40 percent in 2015.
Fifty-four percent of men say they are aware of what cybersecurity jobs entail, compared to only 36 percent of women. Both of those figures are higher than last year, however.
In the United States, 34 percent of people said they would be interested in a job aimed at "making the internet safer," compared to 26 percent last year.
Luckily for those interested in working in cybersecurity, there is enormous demand. Another study released on Wednesday by Cybersecurity Ventures reports that there are 1 million jobs open in the field, and that that figure will rise to 1.5 million by 2019.
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