According to Valimail’s Spring 2019 Email Fraud Landscape, about 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent each day, making it one of the most common types of cyber attacks.
This number shows how crucial it is to train your employees so they can recognize and report malicious emails.
That’s where cyber security awareness training comes in. With the right training program, you can provide your employees with the knowledge required to protect your company against phishing scams.
Effective security awareness training programs don’t look the same to different organizations. Each of them would have different needs and each user will have diverse learning styles and needs.
Here’s what you need to know when developing an engaging and effective awareness training program for you.
Who Should Undergo Cyber Security Awareness Training?
Cyber security awareness training should be company-wide. This means everyone in your organization should take it, including full-time employees, contractors, and any other individuals who access, share, store and edit organizational data.
If your organization works with third-party providers, you should also consider training employees from your suppliers to mitigate third-party risks. Having a strong third-party risk management system can go a long way in protecting your organization against threats or breaches that occur in any one of your suppliers.
What Makes an Effective Cyber Security Awareness Training?
For security awareness training to be successful, it needs to educate all workers about the types of behaviors that amplify security risks, such as clicking on a link, reusing passwords, or entering sensitive information into a suspicious webpage form.
Educate your users on these topics with engaging modules to keep them interested and invested in the program. Moreover, phishing simulations and other web-based communication and reinforcement tools should be leveraged in order to help employees prepare for real-life security threats.
4 Tips to Develop Successful Security Awareness Training
When done right, security awareness training can mitigate the risk of employees being victims of a phishing scam that can cost your company millions of dollars. So how do you do cyber security awareness training right?
1. Create High-Quality Content
The quality of your content can make or break the success of your security awareness program. Make it a point to deliver high-quality, relevant content tailored to specific job roles.
This means that the content should be created by domain experts who understand both cyber security and adult learning.
Cyber attack risks are more frequent among individuals who work in leadership roles. So these individuals should undergo phishing simulations as part of their training, teaching them to detect fake invoices and when not to share their credentials.
2. Choose Whether to Deploy Personalized or Pre-built Training Platforms
Pre-built training covers the general and common cyber security challenges that all organizations experience. On the other hand, personalized campaigns are unique to your company and cover the security requirements and regulations in your industry and country.
Decide which route to take, depending on the needs of your business. If you have a large organization and you’re willing to take the time to plan your security campaign rollout, the personalized route might be the one for you.
3. Decide Whether Training Content Should Be Risk- or Role-based
Risk-based training tackles specific security issues that organizations face, such as phishing while role-based training focuses on specific problems that plague departments and roles, including fake invoices in accounting teams or social engineering for management.
4. Invest in Real-world Phishing Simulations
Classroom training is one thing, but real-world simulations are another. By investing in the latter, you can prepare your employees for real-life security threats.
Successful cyber security awareness training leverages phishing simulations where employees are sent a sample malicious email and data is collected to see how they respond.
Once the data has been gathered, IT and security teams will have a much better idea of how resilient employees are against cyber security threats and determine how to go forward with training.
Let’s Develop Your Cyber Security Awareness Training Plan
Effective cyber security is not just about tools—it’s about equipping your workforce with the knowledge to tackle threats head-on.
From expert-crafted content and targeted training platforms to real-world phishing simulations, the right training can be the difference between vulnerability and resilience.
If you’re unsure where to start or how to refine your approach, we’re here. Let’s collaborate. Reach out and partner with our experts to shape, refine, and launch a security awareness program that truly protects.
