Demand for cybersecurity experts continues to grow as the projected shortage of cybersecurity professionals increases to 1.8 million jobs in 2022. People who take on these positions play an essential part in the business, and the overall price of a data breach in the world is currently $3.62 million.

There are a lot of mistakes that occur in the field which can make your job challenging and put your company at risk. Here are ten common mistakes cybersecurity professionals must avoid to be the most efficient in their job.

1. Overconfidence

The most frequently-made error by security professionals is overconfidence and an illusion of security, as stated by Bahram Attaie, an assistant instructor of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. “They believe they have installed all the necessary security controls, and as a consequence, they believe they’re invulnerable to hack,” Attaie said.

2. To bypass corporate controls.

If corporate security controls hinder cybersecurity professionals from performing their job effectively, They often ignore these or switch their controls off, Pozhogin said. “As security layers need to be in place, there could be incompatibilities among different technologies. Therefore workarounds will be developed, and competing technologies will have to be disabled or turned off, settings that are repetitive need to be modified and neglected to change in various policies,” Pozhogin said.

3. Unsuspecting of false positives

Some cybersecurity professionals are insensitive to false positives when a security software identifies a harmless file as malicious and then blocks it. The possible outcomes are data corruption and an interruption to the operation or total inability to function, Pozhogin said. “Some security experts downplay the possibility of high false positives and opt for security methods. They choose solutions for the security stack with a security stack adjusted to paranoid levels which can result in false positives,” the security expert said.

4. Inability to evaluate the surroundings in their entirety

Security experts are constantly responding to emergencies and fire drills. Still, they often don’t go back to examine if the system is getting less secure, as per Ashwin Krishnan, the author of Mobile Security for Dummies. For instance, a person could elevate the privileges of an administrator who is a senior to super admin, allowing them to perform super admin work during the day, or fill the void left by her boss during vacation but do not be able to go back and remove the privileges due to other issues that occurred. Get your Cyber Security Certification today to become a certified security expert.

5. In disregarding the needs of the user

Though most security professionals recognize that the user is their weakest link in the chain, they tend to ignore users as a component of the solution. They claim “there is no fix for insanity,” said Corey Nachreiner, the CTO of WatchGuard. “The fact is that users training is an essential component to your security strategy when you’re willing to make training a priority,” he said. “Even tiny changes in employees’ behavior will help increase your security performance.”

6. Letting your skills lapse

According to Andrew Newman, CEO and the founder of Reason Core Security, thinking you have all the necessary skills in this field is a risky practice. “In this area of work, you have to be constantly updating your skills or else you be left behind,” he said.

7. The patching process is not completed immediately.

Many companies spend millions of dollars for security solutions only to bypass them simply by not applying the security patch as soon as it is available, Meredith said. Consider recently the WannaCry as well as the GoldenEye attacks, for instance: companies who had put in place a complete security software for managing configurations were not affected because Microsoft had patched the security holes. But many businesses fail to apply the critical security updates until at the very least one week after they’re released, which puts the security of their systems at risk, Meredith said.

8. Alert fatigue syndrome

Alert fatigue is a term that was coined to explain the reason for cybersecurity experts failing to respond to security alerts as they’re overwhelmed by numerous alerts, according to Matt Warner, director of security services at NetWorks Group. “As as a result, crucial alerts are not being received, and threats aren’t identified in time,” he said. “There is no simple solution to this issue other than ensuring that the systems are tuned so that most crucial security alerts following quality and trustworthiness are sent to an analyst to take the correct actions.”

9. Relying too much on third-party vendors

Meredith said that businesses sometimes rely too heavily on hardware and software vendors to safeguard their businesses from security attacks. “As cybersecurity professionals, it’s our responsibility to stay one step ahead of hackers,” he said. “While security hardware and software solutions play a role in the security environment, they’re just that: one cog in the vast array of assets.”

10. Not paying attention to the business aspect.

Cybersecurity is an area full of acronyms like IPS, GAV, XSS, and SQLi, according to Nachreiner. While these acronyms are helpful when speaking to professionals in the field, you have to be aware that many entrepreneurs do not utilize this terminology. “Know your audience,” Nachreiner said. “How you address the upper levels of the company concerning security differs from what you’d talk about with IT administrators and managers.”