What is security awareness and what are the techniques used to incorporate security awareness into organizational culture?
Security awareness training is one of the most important defenses available for an organization. Because, even the best and state-of-the-art security controls, some cyberattacks such as phishing attacks and malware attacks do successfully penetrate the cyber defense measures in the organization. This implies that people are the weakest point in information security programs of an organization due to lapses in judgement, inattentiveness, fatigue, work pressure or skillset limitations. Organizations conduct security awareness training so that personnel can bring behavioral changes and apply basic Internet hygiene on their day-to-day activities. Security awareness training courses should be engaging and relevant to what personnel do in the organization.
The primary purpose of security awareness training is to create security-aware culture in the organization and bring some behavioral changes.
Some techniques to embed security awareness culture into an organization may include:
- Security champions
- Gamification
- Inherent evaluation methods
- Create security awareness training content
- Identify targeted audiences and tune the training content
- Quizzes at the end of each security awareness training
- Establish simulated platforms to learn and practice skills
- Security awareness days, weeks or even months