The majority of information security professionals wholeheartedly agree that security awareness training initiatives lead to a massive and measurable reduction in phishing susceptibility amongst employees in their organisations.
Cyber attackers are increasingly focussing on employees by launching social engineering and phishing attacks.
Organisations must follow suit and take a people centric approach to cyber security.
All organisations will benefit from taking a continuous cyber awareness approach that incorporates the following components.
IDENTIFYING THE RISK KNOWING HOW, WHERE AND WHEN.
Use Cyber Awareness training with quizzes to assess and Identify where employees’ vulnerabilities lie, and use threat intelligence security software to find out which employees are being targeted frequently and HOW.
CHANGING EMPLOYEE BEHAVIOUR CREATING A UNIFIED PURPOSE
Awareness training will give all employees a fundamental knowledge of how to improve their cyber hygiene at work and at home and help in building a culture of security which will have a unified purpose of creating a cyber resilient community at work and at home.
REDUCING EXPOSURE BEING REGULATORY COMPLIENT
Direct attacks to endpoint could probably evade security teams
Establish and implement in client buttons used as email reporting tools to easily forward suspicious emails to response teams with all security information intact and create channels employees can use to rapidly report any malicious and potentially harmful activity.
Encourage a “see something say something policy” which gives security teams the opportunity to identify and address attacks that slip through the perimeter defences.
Cyber Awareness Training will teach employees how to protect third party information adequately which is a specific regulatory requirement under POPI and GDPR.
MEASURE AND ADAPT
Knowledge assessment results helps in establishing starting points to measure against
Follow up exercises will provide additional insights and the opportunity to train users on emerging threats and issues specific to the organisation.
The organisation should see the number of reported threats rates of malware and phishing attacks decrease exponentially and IT teams should see a reduction in the time spent addressing the ramifications of successful cyber attacks
Security awareness training is integral to developing a successful defence against cyber security threats