Context: Thursday morning at RSAC, Bob Rudis and I will be presenting “Achievement Unlocked: Designing a Compelling Security Awareness Program” at 10:40 am in Room 123.
Security Awareness has become a controversial topic. Many organizations have fallen back onto rote, annual, computer-based training (CBT), taking a cookie-cutter, one size fits all approach to the problem. Why? Because auditors started checking to see if programs existed — and their measurement of success was whether or not you’d gotten every employee in the company to certify that they’d receive training. And that led to a checklist-based race to the bottom.
The first step in improvement is to separate policy awareness – that annual verification that employees have been “trained” from security awareness – the steps you take to improve the overall security posture of your employees. If, for instance, you require each of your employees to sit through a one hour CBT annually, then your effectively spending 1 FTE for every ~1600 employees you have just to check that box. That’s a waste of time and money, and your employees know it! By demonstrating that you’re willing to waste their time, they will treat your CBT with the same respect – but playing games to see how fast they can race through it, for instance. Or to find all the picayune errors they can, and laugh about how clueless you are.
You can solve this problem by racing to the bottom even faster: even what your auditors need is to see that every employee has checked a box annually, then one option is to give every employee a box to check annually. Create an automated system that reaches out each year to employees, driving them to a webpage that has an overview of the highlights of the security policy, with some bullets about why they care, with some links to more information for the enterprising souls. And then give them a box to check that records that they’ve checked the box for the year.
Having done that, you can focus on real security awareness training. Real awareness training is much more targeted. Engage users around specific topics. Social Engineering. Phishing. USB drives. Screensavers. Give them a way to respond: at Akamai, we have a mailing list, that everyone with a published phone number is on. When a pretexted call comes in, people can notify the next likely targets of the context of the phone call. Give them incentives: gift cards, or visits from the Penguin of Awesome. Give pro bono personal security training: teach them about attacks that might target their families, and educational resources for their children. And don’t worry about tracking that every single person has consumed every single resource – that’s a waste of energy. Give them what they need, and they’ll clamor for more.