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.
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.
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.
