The Value of Cybersecurity Education & Awareness

Throwing money at hi-tech cybersecurity solutions may not always be the best method to prevent breaches.  In the vast majority of cases, low-tech education and awareness programs have a great impact on an organization’s ability to protect its systems and data from breaches.

According to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 94% of malware was delivered via email and 32% of breaches involved phishing.  And, the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (ISRT) for 2019 stated that 65 percent of attacker groups used spear phishing as the primary infection vector, and Office files account for 48 percent of malicious email attachments.

So if people being susceptible to phishing attacks and email launched malware are leading attack vectors doesn’t it make sense to teach them how to identify potential threats by having them participate in a cyber awareness training program?

These types of programs have been proven to immediately reduce the number of successful attacks. In fact, a recent study by KnowBe4 showed that security awareness training can reduce phishing susceptibility by 75 percent.

If you’d like to learn more about the effectiveness of cybersecurity education, please listen to this episode of Secure Talk where we talked with Jonathan Hiroshi Rossi, Chief Education Officer at www.saya.com.