Security awareness training helps organizations worldwide reduce risks related
to cyber security, building vital threat resilience, and create a strong security-aware culture.
What is Security Awareness Training?
Security awareness training is the practice of educating employees, contractors, partners, and other stakeholders on how they can safeguard sensitive information from cyber threats. Additionally, this process also informs training participants on how they can keep various systems, networks, online accounts, and other digital assets safe from hackers.
Why is Security Awareness Training Important?
Security awareness training helps organizations reduce risk related to the human side of cyber security and build a strong security-aware culture across all business units. To achieve this, CISOs and other security leaders construct risk-based awareness training programs that targets unsafe behaviors like clicking on a phishing email link or downloading a malicious attachment.
With a security awareness program in place, organizations strengthen information security and keep sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property (IP), and accesses to confidential accounts, such as bank accounts. Awareness training can also ensure employees comply with industry or regional data privacy regulations, such as GDPR.
As organizations improve their security awareness maturity model, they often see a sharp decrease in cyber security-related costs, as well as a positive impact on their productivity, revenue generation, and brand reputation.
Does Security Awareness Training Work?
Because all cyber attacks are rooted in human behavior manipulation, security awareness training is the most effective tool to safeguard sensitive information from hackers. By giving employees the knowledge needed to detect and report common threats, organizations minimize the possibility of data breaches compromising their data.
That said, effective training is grounded in effective security awareness planning. An organization’s security awareness professionals must establish clear cyber security goals, the metrics they’ll use to measure performance, and actionable strategies to attain or exceed their aspirations. Boosting employees training participation and completion rates must also be considered.
According to the 2021 Gone Phishing Tournament results, one in every five end users click on suspicious phishing message links. Of those who clicked, three-quarters compromised their data. By implementing dynamic security awareness training options, organizations can avoid extended downtime, revenue loss, and other inevitable data breach consequences.
What Should a Security Awareness Program Include?
The best security awareness solutions combine a variety of different learning activities to deliver an engaging, informative, and fun (yes, work-based training can and should be fun!). Common training program components include (but are not limited to): online courses, quizzes, interactive modules like Serious Games, phishing simulations, and ongoing communication campaigns.
Security awareness program topics will vary based on an organization’s goals and maturity level. However, it’s important to cover a solid spectrum of security awareness fundamentals, such as phishing, social engineering, ransomware, malware, email security, and password best practices. A solid knowledge foundation will improve knowledge retention and phishing simulation performance.
How Do You Implement Security Awareness Training?
The goal of security awareness training is about more than meeting compliance standards or ticking corporate mandates off a checklist. Organizations must strive to build vital cyber threat resilience, based on real-world intel, and, using that momentum, foster an internal culture that prioritizes continuous security awareness education.
To get the most out of your training program, you must implement each element carefully and connect it to you an overarching information security vision. For most security awareness teams, a successful implementation will resemble the following process: