In today's digitally driven world, businesses face ever-increasing cyber threats that can compromise sensitive data, disrupt operations, and damage their reputation and credibility. While many organizations invest heavily in robust cybersecurity measures, they often overlook one critical component: training their end users.
End users, whether they be employees or customers, are the first line of defense against cyber threats -- which is why proper training and awareness is so imperative. A popular platform for this exact endeavor, KnowBe4, understands that strengthening end-users’ awareness and safety precautions is key for fortifying a business’ security posture.
KnowBe4 was founded in 2010 by Stu Sjouwerman, a cybersecurity expert with over 30 years of experience in the industry. Since its inception, the platform has helped thousands of organizations improve their security posture and protect against cyber threats.
In this blog, we will discuss the importance of security awareness training and phishing simulations, and how, with these tools and tactics, KnowBe4 can help organizations set their end-users up for success and achieve their security goals.
In today's digital age, cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and frequent. Hackers are constantly looking for new ways to exploit vulnerabilities in an organization's security system, and one of the most effective ways to do this is through social engineering.
Social engineering is the use of psychological manipulation to trick people into divulging sensitive information or performing actions that compromise security. Security awareness training is essential for organizations to protect themselves against these specific types of attacks.
By educating employees on how to identify and respond to potential security threats, organizations can reduce the likelihood of successful attacks and mitigate the damage caused by any breaches that do occur.
Phishing is the most common form of social engineering attack, and it involves sending fraudulent emails that appear to be from a legitimate source to trick users into clicking on a malicious link or downloading malware. Employees should thoroughly understand how to identify phishing emails and how to navigate an attempted attack properly.
Weak passwords are a major security vulnerability. That is making sure employees understand the importance of strong passwords, and how to create them and keep them secure should be a priority.
With the rise of remote work, mobile devices have become an increasingly larger target for cyber criminals. Helping employees secure their mobile devices and use them safely is instrumental for keeping both their personal and professional data safe.
Today, we’re seeing social media platforms become goldmine of personal information for cyber criminals. All employees, and especially those who have access to a company’s social platform accounts, should be taught how to use social media in a safe and secure way.
We mentioned the importance of training for phishing attacks. One great way to counter these kinds of threats is with phishing simulations. Phishing simulations are mock phishing attacks that are used to test an organization's security awareness training program.
By simulating real-world phishing attacks, organizations can identify areas where employees need additional training and improve their overall security posture. Phishing simulations should be designed to be realistic and challenging, and they should be conducted on a regular basis to ensure that employees remain vigilant and up to date with the latest threats.
Let’s take a look at the specific impact of this training and why it is so beneficial for both individual employees and organizations at large.
End users are the biggest target for various cyberattacks. Educating users about the latest tactics used by cybercriminals helps them remain vigilant and empowers them to make informed decisions when encountering potential risks.
Human error is a leading cause of security breaches. This is because end users, often unknowingly, engage in risky behaviors like clicking on malicious links or downloading suspicious attachments.
Through comprehensive cybersecurity training, businesses can teach their workforce how to recognize these risks, adopt safer practices, and minimize human error. In doing so, organizations can significantly reduce the likelihood of successful cyberattacks and subsequent data breaches.
Organizations entrusted with customer data bear a responsibility to protect it from unauthorized access. Training end users, particularly employees who handle customer information, reinforces the importance of data security and the potential consequences of mishandling sensitive data.
This benefit not only lends protection of the organization’s data in and of itself, but also to the reputation and credibility of said organization as well. By educating employees on data protection best practices through regular training, businesses can create a culture of security that safeguards customer data.
Effective cybersecurity training not only focuses on preventing attacks but also prepares end users to respond appropriately in the event of a breach. Training programs can include guidance on incident reporting procedures, recognizing signs of a breach, and immediate response actions.
When end users are adequately trained and given the proper tools, they become an integral part of the incident response process, allowing organizations to mitigate the impact of an attack swiftly and effectively.
Compliance with industry-specific regulations and data protection laws is essential for businesses operating in today's legal landscape. Training end users on the relevant regulatory requirements --especially in an engaging and interesting way -- ensures that they understand their obligations and the potential consequences of non-compliance.
By integrating compliance-focused training that actually engages end users into cybersecurity programs, organizations can greatly reduce the risk of regulatory penalties and reputational damage resulting from data breaches and compliancy issues.
Cybersecurity is not solely an IT department's responsibility; it is a shared responsibility across the entire organization. By training end users in a continuous way, businesses foster a culture of security where every individual understands their role in protecting sensitive information.
This culture shift ensures that cybersecurity becomes ingrained in daily routines, leading to a proactive and vigilant approach towards potential threats.
KnowBe4 offers a comprehensive security awareness training and phishing simulation solution. The platform helps organizations of all sizes improve their security posture and even incorporates AI. There are a range of features and tools included that make security awareness training and phishing simulations easy, engaging, and effective.
With KnowBe4’s pre-built training content, you’re able to provide your organization with a multitude of resources and training on a variety of security awareness topics. This content is available in multiple formats including videos, interactive modules, and quizzes. It can also be customized to meet the specific needs of each organization.
KnowBe4 offers a range of phishing simulation templates that mimic real-world phishing attacks. These templates can be customized to fit the specific needs of your organization. They can also include a range of different scenarios and attack types.
KnowBe4's platform includes robust reporting and analytics tools. These tools provide organizations with detailed insights into the effectiveness of their security awareness training program. Track employee progress, identify areas where additional training is needed, and measure the overall effectiveness of the program.
Access KnowBe4's automated campaigns! These campaigns enable advanced scheduling to ensure that employees receive regular training. This allows your team to stay engaged and maintain their level of security awareness so that they’re always ready.
Knowbe4 security. Knowbe4 security.
This powerful platform provides ongoing security education and awareness to end users. This is essential in a rapidly changing threat landscape, where new threats and attack methods are constantly emerging.
We're living in an era where cyber threats are prevalent and evolving at rapid speed. Businesses cannot afford to overlook the importance of training their end users. By investing in comprehensive training programs, organizations empower their employees and customers to be proactive in identifying and mitigating risks.
This is because effective training enhances awareness, reduces human error, protects customer data, strengthens incident response capabilities, and ensures compliance. Ultimately, training end users becomes an invaluable asset in fortifying an organization's overall cybersecurity posture.
KnowBe4's platform helps businesses create a culture of security and end user empowerment. Contact us here to learn more about implementing this invaluable resource into your cybersecurity strategy today!
KnowBe4 Security.
In this post, we’ll provide an all-encompassing run down of data security and data privacy, why it’s important, real-world examples, and key tips for your organization to keep your data secure and private.
Data security and data privacy are strongly interconnected but not the same. Knowing the differences is important to better understanding how they work, and what they each mean to your business.
With GDPR over a year old, and the California Consumer Privacy now in effect, it’s now more important than ever for organizations to make sure they understand what these two things are, why they matter and how to address them in their day to day business operations.
It’s especially important for industries with strict compliance laws such as healthcare, legal services, finance, and biotech, however, it does apply to anyone collecting data. It also should be noted that this doesn't just apply to the IT or Compliance department, but really the entire organization from marketing and sales to customer service.
Data privacy is a part of data security and is related to the proper handling of data - how you collect it, how you use it, and maintaining compliance.
Data security is about access and protecting data from unauthorized users through different forms of encryption, key management, and authentication.
With all the legalities now in place protecting consumer’s privacy and data, it’s critical that your business understands the implications of not understanding nor addressing these two items. Now that we’ve covered what they actually are, let’s dive into what it means for you.
As a business, it is your responsibility to keep your data secure and as a result, that also means protecting your employees’, customers’, partners’, and any other contacts’ data safe and secure. Without proper measures in place for this, there are a variety of scenarios that can happen:
1. If you don’t have proper security measures in place such as Multi-Factor Authentication, Multi-Device Management, Identity Management, your business could be at risk for a breach. Aside from employees, your data is your most critical asset. If it becomes compromised, the business will suffer dramatically and may even cease to exist.
2. Without proper measures in place to keep your employee or customer data private, you could be in violation of a variety of regulations. For example, healthcare companies must abide by HIPPA and not share sensitive patient information. This personal information should also not be sold or redistributed without consent. In doing so, you could be 1) violating the law and 2) end up with disgruntled customers who end up leaving you for a competitor. Either way, it has a significant impact on your revenue between fines and loss of customers. Not to mention the reputation you will form that could have lasting effects.
With the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now in place, businesses need to protect the “personal data and privacy of EU citizens for transactions that occur within the EU.” Now, even though this might seem like something similar to the US, there is a significant difference concerning how the EU and US look at identification information.
While under GDPR compliance, companies need to use the same level of data security for both stored personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, as well as cookies. And even though the GDPR applies to the EU, it also applies to anyone that has dealings within the EU.
To learn more about GDPR, here is a checklist we created to make sure your organization is protecting your data.
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) took effect in January of 2020. The reasoning behind this bill was to protect the privacy and data of consumers. Essentially, it gives people the right to determine how their data is stored and shared.
With this law in place, and other states starting to follow, it’s critical for businesses in California to understand the legal ramifications and how to abide by the new law. This new law “creates new consumer rights relating to the access to, deletion of, and sharing of personal information that is collected by businesses” meaning California residents have the right to:
The CCPA applies to the following businesses (must meet only one of the following):
While this may not apply to you now, there are other states and even discussions at the federal level where data privacy rights will be more commonplace. Data isn’t going anywhere, in fact, it’s only growing, so regardless if you fall into today’s thresholds, it can’t hurt to start thinking about it for the future.
Here are a few more tips for being CCPA compliant.
In January 2019, Google was fine $57M under the new GDPR law. This shows that even the biggest companies are still struggling with what this means to them and how to incorporate the right security and compliance measures within their business ecosystems.
The complaint came from a privacy group that accused Google of not properly adjusting their data collection policies with the new GDPR regulations. While the fine may be “immaterial,” it goes to show how much they’re really cracking down on this new law.
3 Tips and Reminders for [Staying Data Secure]
One of the best places to start is making sure you're governing your data and enabling the right individuals to access approved resources, resulting in lowering your security risk. How do you do this? It starts with identity management. Identity management is the security and discipline that enables the right people to access the right resources at the right time for the right reasons. There are many tools that allow for this - our favorite being Azure Active Directory. By implementing Identity Management across your systems and network, you ensure all employee activity and data are monitored and managed in a secure way. For example, so many people are working remotely and still collaborating today - documents are being sent back and forth and shared in a variety of ways. Identity Management allows your employees can do this safely.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while data privacy and data security are certainly interconnected, there are different ways to properly address both.
As a reminder, data security focuses on the technology and tools required to deter cybercriminals from getting their hands on your information such as social security numbers, credit cards, accounts, etc.
Data privacy is complying with local and federal laws within and also outside your industry to ensure the data you’re collecting and the processes behind obtaining and what you do with that data are law-abiding.
Both are incredibly important, so I hope this article helped point you in the right direction.
If you wish to learn more, check out our tips on preparing for the CCPA. If you wish to learn more about how we can help you, learn more about our Compliance Management and Identity Management solutions.
Monday may be our least favorite day of the week, but Thursday is when researchers say that security professionals should watch out for cyber-criminals; paying attention to trends like this can greatly reduce the potential for damage.
Attackers will spend just as much time planning when an email should go out as they do on what it will look like. According to Proofpoint in its Human Factor Report, malicious email attachment message volumes spike more than 38 percent on Thursdays over the average weekday volume, while Wednesdays came in second. “Attackers do their best to make sure messages reach users when they are most likely to click: at the start of the business day in time for them to see and click on malicious messages during working hours,” Proofpoint researchers wrote in the report. Weekends came in last, however, this doesn't mean that Saturday and Sunday are completely safe.
Malicious emails can arrive any day of the week, but there is a clear preference from attackers as to when to send certain threat categories. For example, Keyloggers and Backdoors tend to be sent on Mondays, and Wednesdays are peak days for banking Trojans. Ransomware tends to be sent between Tuesdays and Thursdays, while point-of-sale Trojans arrive towards the end of the week (Thursdays and Fridays) since security teams do not have as much time to detect and mitigate new infections before the weekend. On the weekends, according to Proofpoint, ransomware is what attackers primarily send with few exceptions.
Security teams need to be particularly alert on Thursdays as malicious attachments, malicious URLs, ransomware and point-of-sale infections all favor that day. In addition to these, credential stealing campaigns also favor Thursdays.Thursday were host to a clear increase in malicious attachments being sent, but emails with malicious URLs (the most common vector for phishing attacks designed to steal credentials) were constant throughout the week, with only a slight increase on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Attackers understand employee email habits and know that feeding employees with a well-crafted email at the optimal time will bring higher success rates. The bulk of attack emails are sent four to five hours after the start of the business day, peaking around lunchtime. Proofpoint’s analysis found that nearly 90 percent of clicks on malicious URLs occur within the first 24 hours of delivery, with a half of them occurring within an hour, and a quarter of the clicks occurring within just ten minutes.
The time between delivery and clicking is shown to be the shortest during business hours (8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern) in the US as well as Canada. The UK and rest of Europe had similar patterns to the US and Canada, however, there was some stratification in the averages according to region. For example, clicking on malicious links peaked around 1 p.m. in France while it peaked early in the workday in Switzerland and Germany. Users in the UK spaced out their clicks throughout the day, but there was a clear drop in activity after 2 p.m.
While it’s important to block and keep malicious messages from reaching the inbox to begin with, the other side of email defense is to be able to identify and flag messages that made it to your inbox and block those links when you realize that they are malicious. If you are able to accomplish this, you can greatly reduce the potential danger that these emails pose.
Proofpoint focused on email-based attacks, however, email wasn’t the only medium in which attackers paid attention to the day of the week. An analysis of all attacks, investigated by the eSentire Security Operations Center in the first quarter of 2017, found that some methods of attack were more likely on given days. The volume of threats, which in eSentire’s report included availability attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), fraud, information gathering, intrusion attempts, and malicious code, was highest on Fridays followed by Thursdays. The day of the week did not matter as much when it came to availability attacks, but weekends showed a great dop-off in the amount of risk involved. Malicious code was most common on Thursdays, and intrusion attempts were higher on Fridays.
There is no day off when it comes to defense. The security tools scrutinizing email messages as they arrive, before letting them reach user inboxes, have to be capable of handling peak volumes without sacrificing performance. But if defenders know that the second half of the week tends to be worse in terms of malware and credential theft, they can put in extra monitoring and scanning to detect possible new infections. By allocating more time in the second half of the week to investigate alerts, security teams may detect attacks sooner, and reduce the potential damage.
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