WHAT IS THE BLOG ABOUT?
- WHY DO YOU NEED TO SIMULATE?
- WHAT MAKES THE METHOD WORK WELL?
- HOW TO ORGANIZE EFFECTIVE SIMULATION AND EDUCATION?
Awareness development, phishing simulation, KnowBe4
PHISHING SIMULATION IS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
Anyone who is experienced in anti-phishing, knows that simulations and reactions can go wrong. But it can even destroy the development of cyber security awareness or create excessive mistrust. It’s also not good if users take the topic lightly, but it can also become terrible if they report everything seeming suspicious.
Neither the simulation nor the training should cause stress and it should not aim to discriminate anyone. Its purpose is to maintain awareness, nothing more, nothing less. This can be messed up in many ways, so now we’re giving you a few ideas on how or how not to do it!
WHY DO YOU NEED TO SIMULATE?
Because it’s important for you, as a conscious leader, to know how much your users are phishing-prone. Nowadays, they are not bombarded with letters written in Kenyan spelling, asking for money with unrealistic reasons. There is the deepfake technology, which fakes the reality with almost perfect lookalikes. Everything for building up an attack is available from the cloud, there is MI support behind it, and all of these are easily accessible to anyone. Unfortunately, countless cases prove that users can be forced to make mistakes by putting them under pressure and emotional attacks. Continuous training and repeated simulations can develop reflexes that can arouse suspicion in users against phishing and fraud.
WHY DO YOU NEED TO SIMULATE AND EDUCATE EFFECTIVELY?
Because a presentation lesson every year or every six months, or perhaps a final quiz, cannot create measurable results in the long term, especially without continuous level assessment. But, of course, it is also not good to use boring, numbing courses to extinguish the alertness of the user. Phrases and deep technical information that are repeated to the point of boredom are especially to be avoided. People like to feel good in all circumstances, which is why education and simulation should also be done that way. Visuality, a light and fun approach, and humor are mandatory parts of good education. Unwittingly, users remember better what is fixed in their memory as positive. For this reason, the simulation, which can actually be a scary and tension-causing topic among users, should be run with a positive tone and an approach that rewards the results.
WHAT MAKES THE METHOD WORK WELL?
Security training is not a job, but a plus that users can use in their own private lives. When you leave the company’s gate, you have the same chance of being scammed. The rewarding approach rather refers to the fact that, with the awareness gained during the training, they are able to accept tricky, deceptive situations with healthy suspicion in any environment. During AI-controlled eLearning courses, users receive automatic feedback, which encourages them to go through the same material twice before obtaining a certificate for the given topic. And there are countless topics, unfortunately. It is not only necessary to teach about phishing scams and office abuse, but also to prepare educational materials that raise awareness about all the digital and personal scams that appear in the user’s everyday life. However, these teaching materials should not be long or uninteresting. It is good if they can be “consumed” with a morning coffee on the phone, or even implemented as a game. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt if the course includes streamed series that keep the user watching them for even longer periods of time, probably at home. The point is to develop an interest and commitment to the topic arising naturally, not as a result of coercion.
WHAT IS THE GOAL OF EFFECTIVE SIMULATION?
The goal is to avoid pitfalls that turn the user’s discretion of education and simulation in a negative direction. If your user becomes apathetic, your human firewall will have holes opening, like on 5-year-old network firewalls that have never been updated. That is why the point of simulations is not to trick most of your users. This is not a competition! You need to run simulations that are not tailored to the capabilities of a CISO or cyber professional. In online education, you can teach them countless things, you can have them repeat certain things until they answer well in the short, topic-closing quizzes. But the simulation is an imitation of the live situation in a real work environment, which users can also experience as a failure after making several mistakes. The goal is not to train cyber security specialists, but to raise awareness among users to be able to recognize obvious scams! If you take these into account, you will be able to run efficient simulations.
HOW TO ORGANIZE EFFECTIVE SIMULATION AND EDUCATION?
You must have a lot of experience, knowledge of even more cyber incidents and fraud methods, high-level educational skills, a cloud-based management system with AI support, and thousands of educational materials. But the biggest advantage can be that if you have also educational materials in your own language, which differ from an average “I’ll tell you” e-book publication. This training is not worth doing just because of, for example, it is a requirement. It is only worth investing time in the training if there will be a result. There are no partial results, because if you have 100 “cyber-smart” and 50 “cyber-dumb” colleagues, it’s like you have, in your own network, 10 corporate Wi-Fi access points available with login and 5 available without. That’s why we recommend that you turn to the world’s best awareness developer, KnowBe4. Yes, we can help with this!
CONCLUSION
Run only effective phishing simulations! If you do it wrong, it becomes counterproductive. The purpose of awareness development is not to train cyber security specialists, but to maintain awareness. Last, but not least it doesn’t hurt if you also have full user protection.
