It takes just one inexperienced employee to not pick up on a slightly suspicious email for your business to fall victim. If you are failing to educate and engage your users on security practices, it is likely due to an assumption of common knowledge.
Security awareness programs must instill a common knowledge of concerns and base actions so that users know how they may be targeted and how to respond if they are. A good cyber security awareness program will strengthen the culture of security in your organisation and in turn, improve your overall security posture.
To be successful, security awareness needs to be approached with a programmatic approach, not just a one-time endeavour. For organisations with many priorities and limited resources, it can seem like a big project to tackle. In this blog post, we break down 5 steps to launching a successful security awareness program for businesses of any size or industry.
1. Assess your vulnerabilities
Before you start the process of educating your users it’s helpful to know where you stand. By running a phishing simulation or short survey you can gather intel on the security awareness health of your business and act accordingly. Providing this hard data to your senior executives or business leaders can help to show why security awareness training is needed in the first place and gives you an honest, uncomplicated idea of improvements your business needs to make.
2. Identify your vulnerable users
Once you have gathered insight into the state of your users’ security awareness it’s then important to identify your most vulnerable users. Cybercriminals will often target your Accounts team or high-value individuals such as CEOs, CFOs etc. So it’s important that you understand their cyber security knowledge and if they require extra guidance and training.
3. Tailor your security awareness content to your audience
By tailoring the security awareness content to your audience, you will see greater success in your program. Users will be more engaged when they are able to relate to the content and see how it connects to their everyday lives. Additionally, using short, succinct videos and training course that are easy to consume and fit into busy schedules are far more effective. You can tailor the content according to the areas of vulnerability – whether that’s passwords, social engineering, social media, or remote working etc.
4. Test the success of your security awareness training
Once users have undergone training it is important to measure the success of the program. This can be done testing the knowledge of your users with quizzes and running further phishing simulations to your organisation. This data can then be used as a comparison to your first benchmarking exercise and be presented to the senior executives of your business to show the effectiveness of your security awareness training.
5. Rinse and repeat on an annual basis
Once these steps have been taken it’s important that a cadence is set. Infotrust suggests running this program on an annual basis, as cyber security threats are constantly evolving. It is also important as your user base may change year on year.
Infotrust recommends that a Security Awareness Program such as this be undertaken as part of an ongoing, holistic strategy. To find out more about how Infotrust can help mature your organisation’s security posture reach out to us today on +61 2 9221 5555. Find out more about our current Cyber security Awareness Program here.
