Cyber Chat Episode 1 – Creating a strong human firewall

Managing the ongoing cybersecurity of your IT infrastructure should be a primary concern – whatever the shape or size of your organisation. Cybersecurity breaches are the number one threat in today’s business landscape. Incidents come in many forms: cyber attacks; laptops left on trains; malicious staff; or, even more simply, accidental data loss caused by human error. The human firewall is vital as a line of defence for any organisation and in this video Rob, author of The Human Firewall (available on Amazon) explains what the Human Firewall is.

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Cyber Chat – Episode 1 – video transcript

Hi I’m Rob May. I’m MD of ramsac and welcome to Cyber Chat.

Today, I want to talk to you about what we call the human firewall. So, people invest money in traditional IT protection. So, in a physical firewall, in antivirus, in email and web filtering, in sandbox technology and all those good things. Which are great, but, the biggest risk and also the greatest line of defence when it comes to cyber protection is actually the human firewall.

And the human firewall is the way that you and your colleagues, and myself, it’s the way that we behave and it’s the way that we respond to everything that’s going on around us when it comes to technology. When I visualise any organisation, I visualise it as a massive pipe and that pipe goes through the office building, it’s got lots of twists and turns and at every turn, there’s a junction and on the junction of that pipe is a member of your team and that member of the team needs to be responsible for their bit of the pipe. They’ve got to stop leaks and it’s not that long ago that when it came to cybersecurity, it was put upon IT and it was thought of to be IT’s responsibility and the problem is just way too big and it can no longer be the responsibility of IT and in fact, legally, since the introduction of GDPR in May of 2018, it’s the responsibility of the directors of the business.

So, it’s no longer an IT problem, you can’t rely on one person, your IT manager, it’s too big of a job for her to do. You’ve got to rely on all of your staff, and your staff need to understand that their the human firewall and their your best line of attack so make sure you’re educating, stay safe and I look forward to speaking to you soon, thank you.