The Impact of Effective Employee Cybersecurity Awareness Training

There is a reason that cybersecurity remains in the headlines year after year. Cybercriminals continue to build sophisticated threats, leveraging AI to speed production and create more effective attacks. One of the most effective ways to counter these ongoing threats, besides crafting an integrated cybersecurity solution matrix for your organization, is educating your first and best line of defense – your employees.

Key Takeaways

• 90% of cyberattacks start with phishing emails, making employee cybersecurity training a business-critical defense.
• Effective training programs use real-world simulations, neuroscience, and ongoing reinforcement to build lasting behavioral change.
• Partnering with a managed IT provider like Exigent ensures training aligns with evolving threats and compliance requirements through solutions like Vigilant Awareness.

Your team is critical to protecting your organizational network and its data because one of the most common and effective hacker ploys remains email phishing. Last year, cybersecurity experts reported a 202% rise in phishing attacks, and research has shown that 90% of all cyber attacks start with a phishing email. Those statistics alone should be enough to convince you that the ROI on employee security awareness training is a clear win.

What Is Security Awareness Training?

Training your team to recognize those sneaky attacks is essential to having a cybersecurity-first culture – an approach to safeguarding your organization that begins with your personnel. By consistently discussing security and raising awareness across your organization, you start to see true improvement your cybersecurity stance. Employee training, education about new types of social engineered threats, and reinforcement of the importance of security awareness is an ongoing process that evolves alongside the changing threat types brainstormed by cybercriminals.

When you engage with reputable, effective security awareness training, your team will start to receive automated phishing emails, simulating real-life methods. This allows employees to respond in their environment and puts the training into action at the point of infraction. If an employee clicks on a phishing test, they are redirected to a landing page with a quick training experience, which includes a short, educational video along with tips on how to spot and avoid phishing emails in the future. Over time, employees' habits evolve, their awareness grows, and the chances of a breach decrease.

Effective security awareness training should check several boxes:

• It incorporates into your employee's daily work tasks
• It doesn't punish but instead educates
• It's simple and engaging (maybe even a little humorous)
• It teaches employees new habits
• It applies to everyone (yes, even the C-suite)
• It's personalized

Learn  more about Exigent Vigilant Security Awareness Training

Picking the RIGHT Security Awareness Training

Nearly all training offers phishing tests, online training to explain threats and common indicators of spam or phishing emails, and documents to help your team understand cyber attacks. In addition to those foundational offerings, look for psychological elements in your training solution.

PsySec uses neuroscience, humor, repetition, and a non-punitive approach. Sure, you can warn employees – much like we do our clients – about the dangers of phishing and other attacks, but the true path to success means creating "muscle memory" that changes how your team responds to emails. Four key steps to that are simple: Train Everyone, Expect Mistakes, Set Goals, and Don't Punish Mistakes.

By offering effective security awareness training to your employees, you'll start to build a positive security-aware culture that is considerably more effective than FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

Learn more about SAT in our free guide

The Benefits of Security Training

The need for a broad approach to cybersecurity that yields a true security culture reflects the incredible impact a security disruption can have on any business, large or small. Headlines often blare scary tales of massive data leaks, but behind the scenes, businesses who have been victims of a cyber attack face far more challenges. Data breaches obviously lead to lost information, liability issues, potential criminal and civil lawsuits, and can even force companies to close their doors forever.

But have you considered that your employees might be at risk for long-term identity theft or secondary attacks on their personal information? You also can't overlook that many industries (healthcare, legal, finance) require security training for regulatory compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, CMMC, etc.) and lacking that training can lead to massive fines. Lastly, even if your business manages to stay open after a cyber attack, your brand reputation may take years to recover.

When you balance the investment needed for most security awareness training with those overwhelming losses, it puts it all into focus fairly quickly.

How Much Should You Invest in Security Awareness Training?

Security awareness training is most often outsourced, with many vendors offering programs that retrain employees thinking about email, passwords, and access points. If you partner with a managed IT services provider, that business likely offers a training program or can recommend one. While many cybersecurity vendors have simple, DIY training programs, those programs are often static and lack specifics about new types of threats.

Training your team in cybersecurity best practices is an ongoing effort and should be part of your annual budget. Because of the ongoing evolution of cyber threats and the creative, persistent nature of bad actors, security awareness training is never really "complete." Most programs are priced per employee and include an annual contract. Expect to pay between $10 and $40 per employee for a reputable and thorough program.

For more effective prevention, be sure to work with your IT provider to create a security awareness training policy. Exigent offers training policy guidance as part of our solution, Vigilant Awareness, as well as help with crafting a thorough incident response plan to help in the case a bad actor manages to thwart all your cybersecurity defenses.

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