Why is a Cyber Awareness Knowledge Check Important?

Implementing email cybersecurity is beneficial as a failsafe, but businesses also need to train employees to recognize common email-based threats to stop them before a failsafe is necessary. Security awareness training combined with cybersecurity infrastructure significantly reduces corporate risk, and reducing risk should be the primary goal of your cybersecurity strategy. 

What is Cyber Awareness Training?

Employees are extremely vulnerable to potential social engineering and email-based threats without knowing the red flags. Most data breaches start from a simple human error, so many of today’s attacks target corporate employees to deliver malware, ransomware, and other tools. Malware can be used to remote control user workstations or give cyber-criminals access to internal data. In addition, data can be exfiltrated silently for months before an organization detects it.

Even more damaging is ransomware. If social engineering or email-based threats lead to ransomware, corporate data is stolen, encrypted, and held for ransom. Ransomware can destroy productivity and even put some companies out of business without disaster recovery plans.

Cyber awareness training provides the necessary education for employees to understand how common email-based threats work and how to detect potential social engineering threats. It’s not very time-consuming, so it does not interfere with employee productivity. Still, effective cyber awareness training offers just enough information to help employees understand the cybersecurity landscape and how to navigate it.

Most companies don’t have internal teams to teach cyber awareness, so they outsource training to third-party consultants. Training can be available online using internal documentation, in-class teaching, and webinars. For most training, a small quiz asks a few questions, and employees must pass the security quiz to move on to the next module. Any employees unable to pass the small awareness quiz are given other training opportunities to help them understand concepts. Stakeholders are given results from each employee so that they know which ones could use additional training in the future.

Benefits of Cyber Awareness Training

Every company is at risk of being a target for cybersecurity events, but they can do what is necessary to reduce the risk of being a victim. Several strategies lessen the risks of a data breach and suffering from a cybersecurity incident, and one of them is offering cyber awareness training. Cyber awareness training has several benefits, including risk reduction. Here are a few other benefits companies get from training employees to detect common threats:

• Empowered employees know the signs of a threat and know what to do to report it.
• Your company becomes more resilient to cyber-attacks.
• Employees recognize phishing and don’t interact with malicious attachments or messages.
• Identify risks before they become threats to data and infrastructure integrity.
• Create better strategies around protecting data and securing customer trust.
• All organizational departments create a culture of cybersecurity and work together to fend off threats.
• Artificial intelligence can be leveraged to help identify weak points in your current strategies.
• Customers get reassurance that your organization takes all necessary steps to protect their data.
• Stay compliant with several regulatory standards by implementing employee security training.
• Employees have better confidence in their skill set and do not worry about losing their job to a cybersecurity incident.

Most data breaches start from a simple human error.

How a Cyber Awareness Knowledge Check Helps

After implementing a cybersecurity awareness training strategy, it must be continually monitored to ensure it’s effective. The cybersecurity landscape changes frequently throughout the year, so any security awareness training material must also reflect threats and attacker strategies changes. Phishing and social engineering change frequently, and they are the biggest threats to organizations. Employees need to recognize the changes, and organizations can ensure that their staff and contractors have the education to detect any new threats.

A cyber awareness knowledge check reverifies current cybersecurity training methods and material and gives stakeholders suggestions for critical changes. It can also re-test employees to ensure they haven’t lost any of their current education and forgotten information from previous sessions.

Most cybersecurity training is ongoing, but you don’t want it stale. Outdated cybersecurity training material could lead to a false sense of security for employees and stakeholders. For example, traditional phishing and social engineering are still active today, but most attackers mold their strategies around their target or better ways to trick employees. The cybersecurity landscape evolves after companies find ways to stop specific threats. As the cybersecurity landscape changes, organizations must educate employees on new threat strategies, including those used in ransomware, credential theft, malware, and phishing.

Corporations can approach cyber awareness knowledge checks in several ways. First, assessing the cybersecurity landscape and current training material is necessary. Usually, assessment is done using a third-party vendor, but good vendors already have the research finished. Vendors responsible for cybersecurity awareness training annually investigate the latest threats, email-based attack strategies, and other threat intelligence research and discovery. Through threat intelligence, third-party vendors build new training materials into their online courses.

After the assessment of current materials, any new strategies must be explained to employees. Every security training vendor offers different delivery methods, but most corporations prefer to educate employees using online videos and quizzes. Vendors build new training material, but the organization must require all employees to take the training. The online training notes every corporate account that watches videos and takes quizzes. Any employee that fails an examination can be asked to retake it.

Online security awareness training should cover the latest topics in phishing and social engineering, and it should include in-person physical threats. For example, employees should know not to allow a stranger into a corporate building without verifying that the stranger has a working badge. These physical threats and more should also be included in security awareness training.

How TitanHQ Can Help

TitanHQ wants you to be aware of threats that could harm your organization. So we’ve built a small quiz to help you understand the cybersecurity landscape and get a feel for your knowledge.

Take TitanHQ's free Security Awareness Assessment today.

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