Providing security awareness training to the workforce is necessary for compliance and is often a requirement for getting cybersecurity insurance, but the real purpose of security awareness training is to reduce risk and avoid costly cyberattacks and data breaches.
To get the full benefits you need an effective security awareness training program, where susceptibility to phishing attacks is reduced and your resilience to cyberattacks targeting employees is significantly improved. To help you, we offer some top tips for creating an effective security awareness training program.
Security Awareness Training Must be a Continuous Process
Security awareness training should not be seen as a checkbox item for compliance. To be effective, training needs to be an ongoing process, where the training is reinforced over time. That if unlikely to happen with a once-a-year training session. Another reason for providing ongoing training is cyber threat actors are constantly changing their tactics and regularly come up with new scams. It would be unreasonable to expect employees to be able to recognize these new threats if they have not been covered in training sessions. Through regular training, provided in bite-sized chunks, you can make your employees are made aware of the latest threats which will help them to recognize them when they are encountered.
Make Sure Your Training Content is Interesting
Different employees will respond to different training methods. A classroom-based training session may be good for some employees, but others will respond better to computer-based training, infographics, videos, and quizzes. Keep your training varied to make sure it appeals to a wide audience and try to make the training interesting and engaging to improve knowledge retention, such as using storytelling to trigger emotions and the imagination, and don’t be afraid to use humor. Cybersecurity can be a pretty dry topic for many people and if they can enjoy it, they are more likely to retain the information and apply the training on a day-to-day basis.
Get Buy-in from the C-Suite
If you want to create a security culture in your organization, you will need to get buy in from the C-suite. Any change in culture in an organization needs to start at the top. The C-Suite must be made aware of the importance of security awareness training and cybersecurity, and using data is usually the best approach. Using a security awareness training company that can provide data on the effectiveness of training at reducing risk will help. You will be able to prove the return on investment you are likely to achieve.
Conduct Phishing Simulations After Providing Training
Providing security awareness training is only one step toward developing a security culture and reducing risk. You also need to conduct tests to determine whether your training is being applied on a day-to-day basis, and the best way to test that is with phishing simulations. Conduct realistic simulations to determine whether the training has been effective. If employees fail simulations, provide extra training.
Do Not Punish Employees for Failing Phishing Simulations
Many companies operate a three strikes and you’re out policy for failing phishing simulations or penalize employees in other ways for falling for phishing emails. Around 40% of organizations take disciplinary action against employees for cybersecurity errors such as phishing simulation failures. Punishing employees for failing to identify phishing simulations often does not have the desired effect.
If you want to encourage employees to be more security-aware and create a security culture, creating a culture of fear is unlikely to help. This approach is likely to cause stress and anxiety, which can lead to the creation of a hostile working environment, and that does not help employees become more security aware. Further, when mistakes are made, employees will be much less likely to report their mistakes to the security team out of fear of negative consequences.
Conduct Real-Time Security Awareness Training
Training is likely to be most effective immediately after employees have made a mistake. By using a security awareness training solution such as SafeTitan, the only behavior-driven security training solution that delivers contextual training in real-time, you can deliver relevant training immediately and explain how a mistake was made and how similar errors can be avoided in the future. For instance, if an employee is discovered to be downloading free software from the Internet, an immediate alert can be delivered explaining why it is not allowed and the risks of installing software without approval from the IT department. If a phishing simulation is failed, employees can be alerted immediately, and it can be turned into a relevant training session.
Benchmark to Learn the Effectiveness of Security Awareness Training
Businesses conduct security awareness training to reduce susceptibility to phishing attacks and other cyber threats, but to gauge the effectiveness of the training there must be a benchmark to measure against. Conducting phishing simulations prior to providing training will allow you to measure how effective the training has been. You can use pre-training simulations to determine how many employees are falling for scams and the percentage of simulated phishing emails that are being reported. You can then reassess after providing training and can determine exactly how effective the training has been.
Security Awareness Training and Phishing Simulations are Not Enough
Providing regular security awareness training and conducting phishing simulations are important for improving resilience to cyber threats and will allow you to prove training has been provided for compliance or insurance purposes, but you also need to make sure that training has been absorbed by employees. Don’t just provide training – use quizzes to assess whether the training has been absorbed. You should also analyze the results of phishing simulations to identify any knowledge gaps that need to be addressed with future training courses. If employees are still falling for a certain type of scam, it could be your training that is the issue.
For more information about security awareness training, conducting phishing simulations, and to discover the benefits of real-time security awareness training, contact TitanHQ today for more information about SafeTitan. You can also take advantage of a free trial of the solution before deciding on a purchase.