Making an Impact with Security Awareness Training: Structuring the Program
We have long been fans of security awareness training. As explained in our 2013 paper Security Awareness Training Evolution, employees remain the last line of defense, and in all too many cases those defenses fail. We pointed out many challenges facing security awareness programs, and have since seen modest improvement in some of those areas. But few organizations rave about their security awareness training, which means we still have work to do. In our new series, Making an Impact with Security Awareness Training, we will put the changes of the last few years into proper context, and lay out our thoughts on how security awareness training needs to evolve to provide sustainable risk reduction. First we need to thank our friends at Mimecast, who have agreed to potentially license the content at the end of the project. After 10 years, Securosis remains focused on producing objective research through transparent methodology. So we need security companies which understand the importance of our iterative process of posting content to the blog and letting you, our readers, poke holes in it. Sometimes our research takes unanticipated turns, and we appreciate our licensee’s willingness to allow us to write impactful research – not just stuff which covers their products. Revisiting Security Awareness Training Evolution Before we get going on making an impact, we need to revisit where we’re coming from. Back in 2013 we identified the challenges of security awareness training as: Engaging students: Researchers have spent a lot of time discovering the most effective ways to structure content to teach information with the best retention. But most security awareness training materials seem to be stuck in the education dark ages, and don’t take advantage of these insights. So the first and most important issue is that training materials aren’t very good. For all training, content is king. Unclear objectives: When training materials attempt to cover every possible attack vector they get diluted, and students retain very little of the material. Don’t try to boil the security ocean with an overly broad curriculum. Focus on specific real threats which are likely in your environment. Incentives: Employees typically don’t have any reason to retain information past the completion of training, or to use it on a daily basis. If they click the wrong thing IT will come to clean up the mess, right? Without either positive or negative incentives, employees forget courses as soon as they finish. Organizational headwinds: Political or organizational headwinds can sabotage your training efforts. There are countless reasons other groups within your organization might resist awareness training, but many of them come back to a lack of incentive – mostly because they don’t understand how important it is. And failure to make your case is your problem. The industry has made minor progress in these areas, mostly in the area of engaging content. The short and entertaining content emerging from many awareness training companies does a better job of engaging employees. Compelling characters and a liberal sprinkling of humor help make their videos more impactful and less reminiscent of root canal. But we can’t say a lot of the softer aspects, such as incentives and the politics of who controls training, have improved much. We believe improving attitudes toward security awareness training requires first defining success and getting buy-in for the program early and often. Most organizations haven’t done a great job selling their programs – instead defaulting to the typical reasons for security awareness training, such as a compliance mandate or a nebulous desire to having fewer employees click malicious links. Being clear about what success means as you design the program (or update an existing program) will pay significant dividends down the road. Success by Design If you want your organization to take security awareness training seriously, you need to plan for that. If you don’t know what success looks like you are unlikely to get there. To define success you need a firm understanding of why the organization needs it. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, or because your buddy found a cool vendor with hilarious content. We are talking about communicating business justification for security awareness training, and more importantly what results you expect from your organization’s investment of time and resources. As mentioned above, many training programs are created to address a compliance requirement or a desire to control risk more effectively. Those reasons make sense, even to business people. But quantifying the desired outcomes presents challenges. We advise organizations to gather a baseline of issues to be addressed by training. How many employees click on phishing messages each week when you start? How many DLP alerts do you get indicating potential data leakage? These numbers enable you to define targets and work towards them. We recommend caution – you need to manage expectations, avoiding assumptions of perfection. That means understanding which risks training can alleviate and which it cannot. If the attack involves clicking a link, training can help. If it’s preventing a drive-by download delivered by a compromised ad network, there’s not much employees can do. Once you have managed expectations it’s time to figure out how to measure employee engagement. You might send out a survey to gain feedback on the content. Maybe you will set up a game where different business units can compete. Games and competition can provide effective incentives for participation. You don’t need to offer expensive prizes. Some groups put in herculean effort to win a trophy and bragging rights. To be clear, employees might need to participate in the training to keep their jobs. Continued employment offers a powerful incentive to participate, but not necessarily to retain the material or have it impact day-to-day actions. So we need a better way to connect training to corporate results. The True Measure: Risk Reduction The most valuable outcome is to reduce risk, which gives security awareness training its impact on corporate results. It’s reasonable to expect awareness training to result in fewer successful attacks and less loss: risk reduction. Every other security control and investment needs to reduce risk, so why hasn’t security awareness
