A lengthy, stressful test is what comes to mind when most people hear the acronym “SAT.” But the other “SAT” — a security awareness training, or SAT, program — can also embody those qualities if it’s not managed correctly, and cause just as many headaches for an organisation fighting to mitigate phishing attacks and social engineering scams.
Phishing attacks, despite being mostly conducted via relatively ancient networking technologies in email and SMS, aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, trends show the opposite: a recent survey found that 64% of global IT decision makers still consider phishing one of their primary areas of concern, ranking just below ransomware as the top threat to an organisation’s employees.
With 82% of cyberattacks involving the human element in an organisation, phishing is a low-risk, high-reward venture for attackers in even the most heavily monitored environments because it targets weaknesses in the humans behind the keyboard, rather than the application or device they’re using.
The Importance of an Effective Security Awareness Program
Combatting a crafty social engineering scam, then, requires a security awareness training that engages employees with the most up-to-date social engineering schemes and tricks attackers have in their arsenal. All the money in the world that’s spent on shiny security tools can be rendered useless with one wrong click from an untrained employee. Employers are starting to recognise this, with nearly half of IT leaders wanting to educate themselves further about phishing attacks in the coming year.
Without that buy-in from IT leadership to create a strong culture around security, it’s unlikely that an organisation will be able to develop a robust security awareness training program.
That culture, however, can’t be built in a day’s worth of training, or phishing simulations, or even a week’s worth of lectures on social engineering scams. There is too much to learn about practicing good cyber hygiene to cram into a single training session, and new phishing scams are also constantly emerging that require new skills to defend against.
Organisations that evolve their security awareness training curriculum regularly and keep it interesting for their employees are going to have a smarter security culture, and as a result, spend less time dealing with ransomware, malware and stolen credentials.
The Traits of a Successful Security Awareness Program
Personalising and diversifying that educational security content by offering quizzes, games and tracking metrics for employees is one way to keep employees engaged in building cyber resilience. Security leaders can also tailor their security awareness training to their specific industry, like government, healthcare or financial services.
A successful program also incorporates elements like peer-to-peer coaching, account takeovers and microlearning sessions to help employees recognise a social engineering scam before it happens. It’s encouraging that most organizations — 62%, in fact — have IT leaders that are using some form of security awareness training to educate their employees, but there’s room for improvement.
Security doesn’t have to be as stressful as a standardised test for employees. A training format that empowers employees to take responsibility for their role in cybersecurity awareness can make an enormous difference to a company in avoiding all kinds of intrusions into their network.
Utilise an ongoing program that offers training opportunities in small doses, as opposed to a multi-hour webinar requirement. Educate instead of assuming the worst; your employees inherently want to do the right thing – they don’t want to click on a malicious link, but they need the tools and education to know what to look for. Employees that are confident in their security awareness training will foster a strong security culture outside of mandatory curriculum as well, bolstering the long-term success of their organisation.
Learn more about how to build an effective security awareness training program at your organisation.
This article originally appeared in Forbes.
