07 Dec The Evolution of Cybersecurity – Human Risk Management
You need every employee to be enabled, to be your security champion
– Ashley Rose, CEO at Living Security
Austin, Texas – Dec. 7, 2020
Traditional business thinking says that in order to maximize results, you should identify what each of your employees does best and focus their energies on that. But what if there is something that every organization needs that requires a skill most employees don’t have?
This is the challenge with cybersecurity. The most critical piece of your security posture is also dependent on the one thing that most organizations have the least amount invested in — the human risk. In sports, it’s said that the game is played from the shoulders up. The same is true for the cybersecurity game where human error is the source of 80 percent of breaches.
If traditional business thinking says to focus on strengths, yet there is a glaring weakness that needs to be addressed, isn’t it time that we solved this — and turned our employees into our greatest strength in the fight against cybercriminals?
The Cybersecurity Game
For the better part of this millennium, our world is a highly-connected one, and ease of access trumps most other considerations, especially when it comes to enabling business functionality. We pride ourselves on how integrated our networks and systems are, and silently cringe at the reality of how vulnerable this makes our enterprises.
With this comes the natural game of cat-and-mouse, where cybercriminals try to stay one step ahead of the cybersecurity professionals and hundreds of technology providers that address security problems big and small, trying to plug holes in the ever-growing footprint of interconnectivity. In the cybersecurity game, winning means you have to remain perfect — and losing (potentially everything) is one single mistaken click away.
We Must Stop Accepting Human Error as a Given
Fundamentally, we know that human error is the overwhelming reason that breaches occur. We’ve grown so accustomed to hearing the statistics that we’re almost accepting of its inevitability. But much like the battle between Neo and Agent Smith in the classic film, “The Matrix,” inevitability (human error) isn’t as certain as it may seem to be.
Security Awareness Training was intended to solve this.
With the best intentions, we’ve built Security Awareness Training disciplines within our enterprises. Yet most Security Awareness Training programs face challenges in this battle against inevitability due to limited budgets, and once-a-year attention given to a set of required training courses that check the compliance box for various regulations and guidelines.
Cybercrime TV: Ashley Rose, CEO at Living Security
Security Awareness Training is Broken
Why Your Cybersecurity Technology Stack Isn’t Enough
Why is it that we have a plethora of cybersecurity products at our disposal — the average enterprise has 75 different cybersecurity products in house today — yet most of us still rely on old-school security training? It’s difficult enough to get cybersecurity budget, given that it’s hard to prove ROI on something that prevents potential loss. Getting budget for training employees on how to recognize and react to potential threats is even harder. The challenge is data, or a lack thereof.
Outside of some user completion metrics and some basic phishing stats, there hasn’t been an answer to the ultimate question, “Are my employees less likely to fall for a breach attempt?” When the focus has been, and for many organizations remains, “Are we compliant?” — this allows cybercriminals to easily stay ahead of the least common denominator of “meets compliance.”
If your security awareness team is trying to address this manually, you’re going to be at a huge disadvantage. Some security awareness teams are spending countless hours gathering spreadsheets of alert and security data to try to manually identify what training is needed. This is not only inefficient, it simply cannot correlate the data from your technology stack to derive valuable insights. Automation and integration are key to turning this into an advantage.
Turning Humans Into Your Greatest Advantage
You need every employee to be enabled, to be your security champion. Threats change on a daily basis, and cybercriminals use increasingly sophisticated TTP (tactics, techniques and procedures) to socially engineer their attacks at all levels of the organization. Their goal doesn’t have to be to breach the CEO or the Finance Department, it’s enough to breach any employee, then utilize their access within the network to get to valuable data.
A Human Risk Management platform leverages your personnel, takes a scientific cybersecurity approach to analyzing human risk factors, combined with a ground-breaking approach to Security Awareness Training, and the ability to measure its effectiveness and ROI to give you proven, lasting change that puts an end to cybersecurity breaches in your enterprise.
A successful Human Risk Management platform:
- Automates the data integration to help you identify problem areas about which users and groups need to be strengthened
- Personalizes the type and level of security training to your audience so they know what to look out for and how to respond
- Trains for the next threat with current, updated content, not just check-the-box compliance modules
- Engages your users with a fully gamified platform to improve understanding and retention
The time for traditional business thinking around cybersecurity awareness has passed; it’s time to bring about proven, lasting behavior and culture change. People aren’t the problem, they are the solution.
It’s time for Human Risk Management. Change the game to harness the full power of your end users to create an impenetrable barrier to potential cybercrime in your organization. Living Security is the industry’s first solution to bring you 16x more effective training than traditional security awareness programs, plus Human Risk Management integrated in a single, automated, easy-to-use platform.
To learn more about Living Security’s Human Risk Management platform, please visit our site.
– Ashley Rose is co-founder and CEO at Living Security
Sponsored by Living Security
Experience a game-changing security culture.
Living Security co-founders Ashley and Drew Rose recognized that traditional security awareness programs were failing to move the needle and it was time for a fresh approach.
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