What is Cybersecurity Awareness Month?
Now in its 19th year, Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a collaborative effort between the government and private sector to help CISOs put cybersecurity at the forefront of conversations worldwide. It continues to build momentum and impact. Every October, CISOs spread the latest resources and tools. They talk to employees and customers about staying safe and secure online. The overarching goal is to secure our physical and cyberinfrastructure.
The theme for 2022 is: See Yourself in Cyber.
Talking points include:
- Focus on people vs. technology. Make cybersecurity less large and complex. “It’s easy to stay safe online.”
- Everyone can do something. Relate to the role of each person – whether central cyber role, manager, worker, vendor, or supplier.
- Use tools and resources to promote this year’s key actions:
- Enable Multi-Factor Authentication
- Use Strong Passwords
- Recognize and Report Phishing
- Update Your Software
- Practice the basics. Do what you can against hackers and massive breaches. The basics make a huge difference.
- Start with yourself. It takes an inclusive and collaborative effort to counter cybercrime. Each person has power.
- The hashtags are #CyberForUs and #BeCyberSmart.
It’s always a challenge for busy and overburdened employees to find time for training. From our customers’ experience, taking a risk-based approach works best for CISOs, to raise security awareness.
You need to:
- Work with department managers to meet your needs and challenges.
- Target behaviors that are most important for each person and role.
- Focus on your highest security risks to drill down into everyday practice.
In this article, you’ll see what CISOs can do to leverage Cybersecurity Awareness Month to lower security risks and impact your organization.
4 Things for CISOs to do in your organization
1. Make every month security awareness month
Cybersecurity Awareness Month puts safe cyber practices at the forefront of everyday conversations. It shines a light on the importance of personal security accountability. Your managers and staff are primed and looking into what they can do to make a difference in their everyday work.
Yet, this isn’t enough to reach your security awareness training program goals. Security training isn’t a one-off effort. It’s always on, and people need practice to create new behaviors. They must integrate the learning into context. They must be reminded about new techniques daily in a continuous training process.
While security buzz is high around your organization, it’s an ideal time for CISOs to leverage the momentum with automated security awareness training like CybeReady.
- Transform your security awareness training into an ongoing effort.
- Embed it into your organizational culture to make a real impact.
- Get the tools to turn the heightened awareness into new security habits.
- Adjust difficulty levels to the role, geography, and risk for your diverse employee needs and vulnerabilities.
- Change your employee behavior towards cyber threats they see every day.
2. Make your security content fun
Just like the simple, engaging, everyday conversations during Cybersecurity Awareness Month, your security training must be simple, frequent, and applicable to employees. To do this, your security content must:
- Be short and engaging to maintain the interest of your employees.
- Capture the attention span of your busy employees. People need to want your content and choose to consume it.
- Don’t send long videos and textbooks. It’s a thing of the past. It doesn’t work for your busy, overburdened employees.
- Download our Cybersecurity Awareness Month Kit for more ideas to tailor your content to your different employees’ personas and risk level.
By sending your employees intensive, bite-sized content like CybeReady’s automated security training, your employees can choose to train at the right place and time and engage in learning. Everyone is in search of practical, engaging, and efficient security training.
3. Create a security awareness program that speaks to everyone
The global message of Cybersecurity Awareness Month speaks to everyone. Your security awareness program can take this general communication to a new level. To do this, your training needs to:
- Speak to every employee in a general manner, like during Cybersecurity Month.
- Be flexible and adapt to your employee’s work styles and job disciplines in training.
- Drill down into the needs of every employee for effective results by role, risks, and challenges.
- Tailor your organization’s permissions structure to access sensitive data and quickly upgrade for new risks.
- Keep your staff vigilant – no matter what role and responsibilities.
- Make training accessible to all. Everyone impacts your organizational security.
With data-based simulations like CybeReady, CISOs meet every employee’s work style and characteristics. Seize the moment of failure for long-term results with just-in-time learning. Download CybeReady’s interactive learning kit (need to add hyperlink) to guide your employees on the unique cyber threats they’re exposed to and provide tips on mitigating them.
4. Involve your department managers to make an impact at every level
CISOs must get the buy-in of managers across the organization for ongoing success. CISOs need managers for the right communication. The managers must:
- Act as your security messengers. They must talk to your employees about security and its importance.
- Be active in your training. To lead, they need data on how their teams perform.
- Communicate with data. Data is critical for a deeper understanding of your training effectiveness for each department.
- Focus on results. With the correct data, don’t lose time on:
- a) Metrics – Deciding what metrics to collect and share.
- b) Reports – Creating templates, generating and sending reports for each team.
- c) Logistics – Repeating monthly manual processes that could easily be streamlined.
With a data, science-driven Managers Program like CybeReady’s security awareness platform, automate all your communication in seconds to meet your security challenges. Communicate in a new way for greater team involvement:
- Create a monthly security snapshot of department metrics and performance
- Automate report distribution for easy, readily available access in 40 languages
- Get a new comparative report to compare results between departments
- Increase motivation to set improvement goals by needs
- Collaborate to be better than others (coopetition) for everyone’s benefit.
Unleash a Proven CISO Toolkit to Motivate Your Managers with Data
CISOs get a unique opportunity every year to build momentum during Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Get the buy-in of your department managers to boost your security awareness program with new data and the right tools. Download our CISO resources or schedule a demo to learn how CybeReady’s fully automated security awareness training platform helps your security teams to create high motivation to make an impact with data in your security awareness program. Make every month Cyber Security Awareness month.
