Security awareness training and education components

Security awareness training is a strategy used by IT and security professionals to prevent and mitigate user risk. These programs are designed to help users and employees understand the role they play in helping to combat information security breaches. Effective security awareness training helps employees understand proper cyber hygiene, the security risks associated with their actions and to identify cyber attacks they may encounter via email and the web.

 

Security awareness training and education components

 

Why do your employees need security awareness training?

Research suggests that human error is involved in more than 90% of security breaches. Security awareness training helps to minimize risk thus preventing the loss of PII, IP, money or brand reputation. An effective awareness training program addresses the cybersecurity mistakes that employees may make when using email, the web and in the physical world such as tailgaiting or improper document disposal.

 

Use phishing tests to increase security awareness

It’s easy to set up a phishing email test campaign on the Mimecast Awareness Training platform. In under 10 minutes, you can be ready to deploy a phish template to your users:

  • Use real-life de-weaponized attacks, or our realistic single-page and multi-page templates which cover everything from phony promotions and package tracking to fake news and password resets due to unauthorized logins.
  • Quickly customize your phish text and landing pages to reflect anticipated attempts against your employees.
  • Specify which employees will receive your phishing email tests, which templates they'll receive, and when you want to launch.

 

What are best practices for how to approach awareness training?

Effective security awareness training focuses on engaging today’s workforce to reduce user risk. Many security awareness training programs ignore education best practices, delivering training in one-off sessions that overwhelm users with information or worse, are forgettable. For training to stick, it needs to be persistent, delivered regularly in small doses, to fit employees’ busy schedules. Most importantly, positive reinforcement and humor performs better than fear-based or boring messaging to improve retention of critical security topics.

 

Security awareness training and education components

 

Why choose security awareness training from Mimecast?

Mimecast security awareness training is highly effective at changing employee attitudes and behavior around critical security practices. Additional benefits of include:

  • Expert content. Our highly engaging cybersecurity awareness training content is professionally produced by veterans of the television industry and developed by the insight and expertise of former law enforcement, military and CISOs.
  • Simple administration. Mimecast’s cloud-based platform, Mime|OS, makes it easy to manage policies and users for web, email security and awareness training within a single console.

 

Critical security awareness training topics

Mimecast Awareness Training regularly releases new training modules to keep content fresh for your users and reflect emerging security threats your organization faces. In addition to 12 to 15 annual training modules focused on information security topics, Mimecast releases monthly shorter trainings based on trending cyberattacks or season scams and specialty topics covering new data privacy regulations.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Phishing awareness, teaching employees how to recognize and deal with potential phishing emails
  • Password security, including instruction on using strong passwords and avoiding personal passwords.
  • Privacy issues, with instructions on how to protect the sensitive data of customers, partners, other employees and the company.
  • Compliance, covering compliance for HIPAA, PCI and GDPR.
  • Insider threats, instructing employees how to recognize threats that may come from inside the organization.
  • CEO/wire fraud, showing employees how attackers may impersonate a C-level executive to defraud the company of thousands of dollars.
  • Data in motion, helping employees understand how vulnerable data in motion is and how they can protect it.
  • Office hygiene, helping employees understand the best way to protect paper, desks, screens and buildings.

 

Additional security awareness training FAQs:

How long does it take to build a security awareness training program?

The time required to build an IT awareness security program depends on the technology and methodology you choose. As an online platform, Mimecast Awareness Training can be deployed and configured quickly, rolling out awareness training to a global workforce easily.

How often should you conduct security awareness training programs?

Data shows that employees are far less likely to retain information from a cybersecurity awareness training program if the program is conducted infrequently and requires a large time investment. Some cybersecurity training programs require hours of an employee’s time often leading to employees tuning out the training and simply going through the motions to check the requirement off their to-do list. Mimecast Awareness Training is different. Our engaging, seriously funny 3- to 5-minute modules are delivered monthly to make training a regular part of an employee’s responsibilities without overwhelming them.

How do you raise awareness on cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity awareness is a journey - by regularly providing cybersecurity awareness training to employees in a fun and educating way, you can make cybersecurity everyone's role.

How much does a security awareness training program cost?

The cost of an effective security awareness training program will vary depending on the size of your organization. Both small to mid-sized businesses and global enterprise organizations can implement Mimecast Awareness Training for a fraction of what a successful cyber breach costs a company in revenue losses. For added layers of security and additional cost savings, Mimecast Awareness Training can be bundled into a number of comprehensive cybersecurity plans.

What are the seven 7 main components of security awareness?

7 Essential Security Awareness Training Topics.
Email Security. Email is the primary method that attackers will use in order to target your organisation. ... .
Web Security. Cybercrime is rampant on the web today. ... .
Mobile Security. ... .
Data Protection. ... .
Environmental Security. ... .
Malware. ... .
Social Engineering..

What is security training and education?

Security awareness training is a formal process for educating employees and third-party stakeholders, like contractors and business partners, how to protect an organization's computer systems, along with its data, people and other assets, from internet-based threats or criminals.

What is the purpose of security awareness training and education?

Security awareness training is a strategy used by IT and security professionals to prevent and mitigate user risk. These programs are designed to help users and employees understand the role they play in helping to combat information security breaches.

What are the 5 elements of security?

The U.S. Department of Defense has promulgated the Five Pillars of Information Assurance model that includes the protection of confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and non-repudiation of user data.