What is Human Firewall? Can it Protect Against Cyberattacks?

Cyberattacks often occur due to a lack of understanding of business security and slight human errors. These include acting upon a phishing email, downloading an infected file, or accidentally sharing confidential business data with an insider attacker. Also, new employees aren't well acquainted with your company's Cybersecurity best practices and can make mistakes as they don't know any better. The business later has to deal with its devastating consequences. Since naive humans are responsible for most successful cyberattacks, having a Human Firewall can be the best solution for better cyber security.

Getting confused about what a human firewall is? Let's understand it in detail and learn how it is essential for every growing business in today's modern and perilous world.

What is a Human Firewall?

In a nutshell, a human firewall is nothing but a front security layer that does not involve software or hardware but humans as the first defense line. An effective human firewall can identify known and unknown cyber threats and educate new employees about the business best practices to mitigate risk and prevent them from causing yet another cyberattack.

The concept of a human firewall is pretty straightforward. You just need a handful of passionate, committed employees who are well acquainted with your business's best security practices and educate other teams to follow these best practices as well. This group of employees does much more than security champions do, which is just learning, educating, and spreading awareness about threats. They also report any suspicious activity or possible data breaches as and when they happen. The more people you have committed to being a part of the firewall, the stronger your wall gets.

Is Training Your Employees Not Enough?

The answer is probably no. Most dreadful cyber-attacks happen due to employees' carelessness or unawareness of security best practices. A study at the Ponemon institute shares that almost 25% of successful cyberattacks are due to simple human errors. Thus, training your employees is indeed not enough, as you will never know if an employee accidentally makes a mistake. Hence, every business must have a trusted group of employees as a part of their human firewall to flag suspicious behavior and potential security breaches in real-time.

Is the IT Team Not Enough?

If you have an in-house IT team, you would know how overwhelmed they are sometimes. IT professionals have to deal with a lot of different challenges in a day that give them no room little room to observe employees' minute activities and monitor their behavior. Hence, having an eye team is not adequate to mitigate all sorts of attacks and risks to your security infrastructure. On the other hand, having a solid human firewall will be dedicated only to finding out and reporting advanced, sophisticated attacks and help you protect your business at all times.

In a nutshell, firewalls and security solutions are suitable for mitigating specific attacks. However, the experience and intelligence of your employees who are part of a human firewall can sometimes beat it. And hence, your business's security lies in the hands of employees involved in human firewall than it depends on an IT team.

The Benefits of Having a Human Firewall

• 1. There are many benefits of deploying a human firewall into your business security infrastructure. However, one of the most important ones is that apart from educating your employees, a firewall prevents human error and mitigates the risk of security breaches.

• 2. The employees involved in a human firewall must be professionals who know how malware functions inside and out. They then train new employees not to click on malicious links, open or act on a phishing email, download an infected unknown file, or share business information outside the Business Network.

• 3. The human firewall also comes into play while protecting business hardware and software, including corporate devices and other endpoints.

• 4. A firewall also ensures that all the employees share the same network and get proper cybersecurity training to spot potential attacks and suspicious text messages or emails at first glance.

• 5. Last but not least, firewalls are actively working to identify any potential insider attack That can harm business security infrastructure.

Bigger the Human Firewall, the Better the Security!

With the ever-changing world, cybercriminals are also coming up with more sophisticated attacks to exploit your business security environment. Every business needs a solid firewall in a risky scenario where your security posture is always on the edge of getting attacked. Even if you have a firewall in place, you should always think about expanding it, as having an ever-growing human firewall is critical to mitigate threat actors and protect your network.

In the end, always remember that each of your employees is a potential part of your human firewall if provided with the proper training, enough resources, and patience. So, keep working on growing your firewall, as the more extensive your firewall gets, the stronger your security posture will be.

With 20+ years of expertise in building cloud-native services and security solutions, Nolan Foster spearheads Public Cloud and Managed Security Services at Ace Cloud Hosting.