It’s no wonder that phishing attacks are becoming more sophisticated and occurring more frequently. This year alone, APWG reported a record-high total number of phishing attacks of 1,097,811. These attacks continue to target organizations and individuals to get their sensitive information.
Hard news: They are often successful, with long-term negative effects on your organization and employees, including:
- Lost money
- damaged reputation
- Loss of intellectual property
- Operational interruption
- Negative impact on company culture
Harder news: These can often be easily avoided.
Scam, educate your employees, and create a culture of cyber awareness? These are topics on which we are sensitive and well versed. So, how can you effectively protect your organization against phishing attempts? These best practices will help transform your employees’ behavior and build your organization’s resilience to phishing attacks.
Overall training plan for human resources:
According to the 2022 Tessian Security Culture Report, “security leaders underestimate the extent to which they should be involved in the employee experience” during onboarding, role change, job transition, transition. locations and daily activities.
But we’ve found time and time again that impromptu, impromptu employee training efforts don’t work. If you want enough internal protection against sophisticated phishing threats, you should train 100% of your employees monthly.
It’s not easy if your team is growing rapidly or spread across different locations and time zones. However, doing anything below 100% staff training will leave you with too many security holes and opportunities for hackers to get in. Unfortunately, that also means you have no way of knowing an employee’s level of threat awareness or whether they know how to respond to threats. You may be missing out on your weakest link or in a situation that could have been easily avoided.
Apply continuous training
Have you ever been told there will be a fire evacuation drill? Chances are, you weren’t caught off guard when the session started and you should have been paying more attention. That’s the thing about the exercise; they stand ready to prepare us for current and future threats.
Cybersecurity training is no different. Although it can quickly tick the compliance box to meet the minimum requirements. To prevent that, you need to catch your employees off guard. Knowing that a threat can emerge at any time helps keep employees alert and accountable amid broader training campaigns.
It’s best if you constantly give your employees these unexpected opportunities to learn. They could easily make avoidable mistakes if they only received simulations occasionally. You could miss out on new hires without adequate cybersecurity training, or it could take time for them to review and build on this training.
Solution: Conducting consistent cybersecurity training is the best way for everyone to keep this in mind—training for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Implement responsive content
You can use cybersecurity insights or departments as a category. Start by dividing your workforce into teams. Then develop adaptive training based on the needs of each group – and even on individual behavior. That is important to adequately address the challenges in certain scenarios of future offensive campaigns.
These may include requests for data or passwords, messages from legitimate sources, or actual content relevant to a particular role or department of the organization.
You strengthen your employees’ defenses by tailoring your content to individual responses and specific attack vectors. Doing so turns the human element from a vulnerability into a security advantage.
Localize your cybersecurity training
English may be your company language, but it may not be the mother tongue of every employee and the cultural context may be perceived differently in some branches.
Using an employee’s native language within the cultural context of a location will significantly enhance their academic retention. By citing local references (such as national holidays, important news sources, popular social media platforms, etc.), you make your simulation believable. and easier to contact. Your employees will likely pay better attention during training and will be less likely to be attacked.
Finally, there can be different meanings regarding email compliance standards in different places. Make sure your team is aware of that and incorporate the necessary precautions during training at these locations.
Back up your online training with Data Science
In our experience, one in five employees is a “bulk clicker”. Repeated clickers clicking, opening, and downloading attachments often put themselves and your organization at risk. They can be a new or existing employee. We’ve seen it all, from beginner positions to corporate stakeholders.
They are not trained or equipped to reliably identify phishing attacks, nor understand their dangers and destructive impact. So they keep clicking on links in emails they shouldn’t have opened.
Good news: We believe mass clicks can be cured as we have seen it over and over again during employee training and education.
We know that serial clickers are just one of those things to worry about. Employees react differently to many attack vectors. You should use data science to understand how groups of employees in your organization – from new hires, executive leaders, and veterans – respond to potential threats.
After analyzing the data to understand the behavior of these groups, you can develop programs to shift them to a more informed approach to email management based on their specific needs and where they are in the journey. raise awareness about network security.
These programs must include expert knowledge, tailored frequency, timely reminders, customized simulations, and training content designed for vulnerable groups while respecting privacy employee privacy.
Automate your cybersecurity education
Regardless of the size of your organization, the complexity required to run a training program like the one described above can be challenging. Whether you’re looking at it from a time, resource, or economic perspective, it’s virtually impossible to do without a solution that truly automates the expertise that is baked into the software.
CyberReady provides a fully automated platform powered by machine learning. It minimizes the risk of human error through a continuing education approach that provides ongoing, adaptive, engaging training. Contact us today to foster a culture of caring, keeping information to keep your organization safe, and feeling accountable. Make your organization cyber-ready. Learn how you can upgrade your security awareness program with a short, saline-sanitized demo.
