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Mon, November 11, 2013

Security Awareness Training Evolution

By Mike Rothman

Everyone has an opinion about security awareness training, and most of them are negative. Waste of time! Ineffective! Boring! We have heard them all. And the criticism isn’t wrong – much of the content driving security awareness training is lame. Which is probably the kindest thing we can say about it. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Actually, it cannot remain this way – there is too much at stake. Users remain the lowest-hanging fruit for attackers, and as long as that is the case attackers will continue to target them. Educating users about security is not a panacea, but it can and does help.

It’s not like a focus on security awareness training is the flavor of the day for us. We have been talking about the importance of training users for years, as unpopular as it remains. The main argument against security training is that it doesn’t work. That’s just not true. But it doesn’t work for everyone. Like security in general, there is no 100%. Some employees will never get it – mostly because they just don’t care – but they do bring enough value to the organization that no matter what they do (short of a felony) they are sticking around. Then there is everyone else. Maybe it’s 50% of your folks, or perhaps 90%. Regardless of the number of employees who can be influenced by better security training content, wouldn’t it make your life easier if you didn’t have to clean up after them? We have seen training reduce the amount of time spent cleaning up easily avoidable mistakes.

The Security Awareness Training Evolution paper discusses how we believe training needs to evolve. It offers ways to improve training content, and ensure the right support and incentives are in place for training to succeed. Here is the table of contents so you can see how the paper breaks down:

We would like to thank our friends at PhishMe for licensing this paper. Remember, it is through the generosity of our licensees that you get to read our stuff for this nifty price. Here is another quote from the paper to sum things up:

As we have said throughout this paper, employees are clearly the weakest link in your security defenses, so without a plan to actively prepare them for battle you have a low chance of success. It is not about making every employee a security ninja – instead focus on preventing most of them from falling for simplistic attacks. You will still be exploited, but make it harder for attackers so you suffer less frequent compromise. Security-aware employees protect your data more effectively, it’s as simple as that, regardless of what you hear from naysayers.

Download: Security Awareness Training Evolution (PDF)

Attachments

Securosis_SecurityAwarenessTrainingEvolution_FINAL.pdf [288KB]

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