How Can Security Awareness Training Improve Your Security Posture?

Cyberattacks are unrelenting, affecting more and more businesses. These attacks are often covert and sophisticated and utilize social engineering in addition to exploiting structural vulnerabilities. Buying costly cybersecurity technology is insufficient to deal with cyber criminals and security awareness training is essential.

The reality is that in today’s climate cyber risk is business risk, and everyone in the organization needs to be involved in keeping mission-critical assets safe and secure. This involves shifting to an operational and intelligence approach to cybersecurity. 

Read on to learn more about how social engineering attacks put organizations at risk of costly cyber attacks, as well as the advantage of security awareness training as a managed service. 

The Human Element in Cybersecurity 

Part of what makes cyber attacks so elusive is the fact that there’s often a human element that causes a breach or vulnerability. Cybercriminals utilize social engineering: Deceptive tactics used to manipulate employees into divulging personal or confidential business information. 

Social engineering attacks are common and powerful because it’s easier to exploit human nature’s tendency to trust than it is to hack into a system.

A common social engineering attack is a phishing attempt. These are communication attempts (usually via email) that seek to trick an employee into giving up information. A phishing message can pretend to be from a friend that is sending a link, usually with a message like “wow, this was so cool!” to entice the user to open the link.

Once the employee clicks on the link, malware is introduced into the system. Other phishing attempts are masked as banks or even internal departments. 

The most technologically sophisticated system can easily be breached if just one of these phishing attempts is successful. In fact, 88% of data breaches are the result of an employee action, including as a response to phishing attempts. 

Instead of viewing employees as taking an active role in keeping the organization safe from cyber attacks, many employers view the “human factor” of social engineering attacks as an uncontrollable variable in cybersecurity. 

Security management training helps train employees to detect social engineering attacks and respond correctly. 

What’s Effective Security Awareness Training?

Given the prevalence of social engineering attacks, many organizations utilize managed security awareness training to teach employees to avoid being complicit in cyber attacks. 

Traditional approaches to security awareness training conduct training once a year, and present information in a static way. The problem is that 80% of employees forget what they learn in just one month, which means they’re very likely to forget their security management training for most of the year. 

Security awareness training often faces operational issues in both employee participation and administration. Employees can view these training sessions as boring, and therefore resist attending. Plus, security awareness training sessions are too infrequently held, and the information learned is seldom reinforced.

Many times companies don’t have the required resources to devote to effective training, nor do they have any support in creating an awareness program. Security training programs that become a burden to administrators and fail to engage employees ultimately lose steam and become inefficient. 

For security awareness training to be effective it needs to be continuous, positive, and friction-free for employees. The goal is to get active buy-in from employees and administrators alike, so everyone is engaged. Constant, easy-to-understand security training ensures that cybersecurity is on the top of mind for everyone.

Ultimately, as threats evolve and change, so too should security management training content. 

Providing continuous and adaptive security awareness training requires time and resources that most administrators don’t have. By outsourcing security management training as a managed service your organization can offload security awareness and dynamically respond to new social engineering threats. 

Leveraging Managed Security Awareness to Reduce Social Engineering Attacks

Managed security awareness is a done-for-you service that prepares employees to stop social engineering attacks and reduces the risk of human error in your organization. Instead of dedicating IT resources to awareness and monitoring of social engineering threats, a managed security team can do it for you. 

Carbon60 has partnered with Arctic Wolf to provide managed security awareness services as part of our suite of managed cloud security solutions. Our managed security awareness service eliminates overhead for IT teams and provides employees with a frictionless engaging way to learn. 

Our services go beyond just security management training. Our Concierge Security Team scours the dark and gray web for around-the-clock account takeover monitoring to know if your domains or contacts have become exposed. We also provide frequent phishing simulations based on current threat vectors that mimic real-world attacks. All simulations are followed up with immediate feedback to employees. 

Our managed security awareness service includes ongoing and engaging microlearning for improved employee retention. All lessons are three minutes or less and delivered consistently to keep security on top of everyone’s mind. Using the integrated dashboard, your Awareness Coach provides regular updates on both employee performance and overall organization security goals. 
Contact us to learn more about our security awareness training and to receive a free demo.