In the world of privacy and information security compliance, your employees can either be your greatest source of risk or your first line of defense. How so? A well-trained employee can be the difference between a significant data breach and a near miss. Recent headlines reveal how employees’ inadvertent mistakes led to these widely publicized information security breaches:

Properly trained, your employees will not inappropriately download and take home with them files that include the Social Security numbers of millions, only to have their laptops stolen. Actual headline: “VA Loses Data on 26 Million Veterans: Employee Claims Laptop With Sensitive Data Was Stolen.”

Properly trained, your employees will not use peer-to-peer file -sharing programs on their work computers, potentially exposing files they did not intend to share. Actual headline: “Widespread Data Breaches Uncovered by FTC Probe: FTC Warns of Improper Release of Sensitive Consumer Data on P2P File-Sharing Networks. (More than 100 organizations were affected.)”