Implementing Effective Cybersecurity Training

Teaching clients what to do when they see something phishy can be a challenge for many organizations. Most security awareness programs are ineffective as they are neither routine, job-embedded, ongoing or made relevant to employees to get them to care about. Many still erroneously believe that security is “solely an IT thing to worry about”. 

Cybersecurity isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a people problem. More importantly, it’s a brand issue. A breach many times destroys a brand that took decades of time, money and resources to build. All destroyed in a matter of minutes by a couple clicks of a mouse.

Keeping employees inside the security equation strong requires that all people in your organization have an awareness of security. It’s the key reason security awareness programs are critical.

The goal of implementing an effective security awareness is to increase understanding by everyone online. Everyone. It requires a practical implementation of security best practices. A program-to be effective-should be reinforced on a regular basis.

Here’s what you need to know to create a first-class security awareness program.

Defining a “Security Awareness Program”

A security awareness program is a way to ensure that everyone has know-how about security along with an appropriate sense of responsibility. It explains WHY cybersecurity is relevant to them personally and professionally.

It involves several stages:

• Assessing a baseline of overall knowledge
• Test Phishing
• Initial live training
• Ongoing reinforcement & updates
• Test Phishing & Content Evaluation
• Ongoing and Job-Embedded Training
• Revisited Training & Continued Testing
• Empirical data review and spot testing of “Super-clickers”

The way we see it, the first line of defense in any security posture is your people. All the AV/AM and firewalls in the world will not stop a breach is untrained employees cause vulnerabilities and do not know how to spot phishy scenarios.

There are many stages of the evolution of a good cybersecurity program. It’s starts where none exists (non-existent). Then it evolves where an organization is forced to do some minor training due to compliance. This is overall ineffective though meets compliance standards.

A culture shift occurs, and real progress is found where an organization promotes awareness and see behavior change. This is done by ongoing training, starting at employee onboarding and continuing for all throughout the year with facets like those noted above.

An effective security awareness program should arm your employees from day-one and embed their job with ongoing security awareness integrated into the culture of the organization.

Why? Because your brand depends on it.

We will evaluate more details of these stages in the next article in this series.

For more information, please feel free to PM David Mauro.