Why is security awareness training so important to our organization?

Security awareness training equips people with knowledge,turning them into a business' first line of effective defence.

Security awareness is important because it brings the knowledge necessary for any employee of our organization to recognize a potential threat to the organization, be it malware, spoofing, hacking, etc. The alternative could be ransomware, IP theft, data harvesting in order to extort, etc.

Our biggest residual risk is human error and this is the primary mitigation.

Security awareness is vital to keeping our organization safe from bad actors. Since improving our security training plan we're seeing a sharp increase in reported emails through KnowBe4 and their PhishRIP functionality is quarantining other threatening emails. Prior to implementing KnowBe4 we were manually finding and isolating threatening emails which took multiple days in some cases to catch emails. Now users can report and email and a quarantine process can be kicked off instantly. Beyond emails thought security awareness keeps your organization safe from a physical presence perspective. While emails are the primary way bad actors enter your systems, it is just as possible that following people into secure areas or photos posted on social media with company information can leak information. It's better to inform people on what could happen before it happens rather than try and create a teachable moment from a failure.

Why you ask? Without it, the organization is at tremendous risk to the vulnerabilities to be revealed and predator's awaiting a misstep to capitalize on an opportunity to wreak havoc. Every member of the organization has the potential to becoming the weakest link without security awareness training.

Security awareness is so important to organizations because the easiest access to the company network is through the end-users. When end-users are not trained to recognize the tricks hackers use to gain access, they become easy targets. Once they gain access through something as simple as an email, they can sit in your network for months gathering information. Ultimately, they could shutdown day to day operations and require a ransom to restore the companies files.