All on Board: How Employees Become an Active Part of IT Security

Have you ever overheard a conversation like this? Two employees are on a break talking about a well-crafted phishing email.

“The email almost convinced me! It looked just like the one from my bank. I was supposed to verify my data because something had changed by law,” says one of them. “Yes, I have heard of such e-mails. There’s a big warning about it right now,” the colleague replies.

If phishing has already been an issue in your company, great! That’s a very good sign. Indeed, in several respects: First, your employees are aware of cyber dangers – there is a certain awareness of IT security in your workforce. And second, phishing attempts are highly likely to be unsuccessful on your end. In this way, you avoid not only company data falling into the wrong hands, but also financial damage, for example due to data protection breaches.

But how can companies also sensitize employees to cyber dangers who tend to be careless on the web? How can they be motivated to change their behavior in the long term? This is where security awareness training can help.

Long-term training

The ongoing new developments in IT security, the dynamic threat situation and the changes in the IT infrastructure mean that the IT security concept must be continuously adapted. This also includes keeping employee security awareness a high priority. Unfortunately, IT security training conducted once a year with a fixed set of presentation slides is not enough.

Security awareness training counteracts precisely these challenges: Set up as entertaining online courses, the trainings can be completed over a longer period of time, over and over again in between. Course after course, employees learn more about phishing, ransomware and the like, how it affects them and, above all, what they can do about it themselves.

Interactive and vivid

To ensure that the newly acquired knowledge is firmly anchored in the minds of the team, the training courses should also be optimally structured from a didactic point of view. Getting active yourself, trying things out, being allowed to make mistakes – all these efforts promote a willingness to learn. Well-designed awareness training conveys knowledge in a varied and comprehensible way. For example, through a mix of multiple-choice questions, videos, small games and drag-and-drop tasks.

The questions and scenarios addressed in the courses are ideally familiar to learners from their own everyday lives. An unexpected contact request on Facebook, newspaper headlines about hacker attacks, working with a laptop at the kitchen table in the home office – these examples become vivid and relatable.

The teaching methods behind awareness training must also be right. The G DATA academy’s learning series on “Phishing” received the Comenius award for this. Credits: G DATA

On the way to becoming a human firewall

In order for employees to become a “human firewall,” regular and engaging training is therefore crucial. People who are interested in what they are doing learn better – and, above all, sustainably. This is exactly what the G DATA academy aims to achieve.

If you would like to turn your employees into IT security experts, we would be happy to support you. What about a  free trial of our awareness training courses? Who knows, maybe cybersecurity will be an even more frequent topic during your lunch breaks in the future.

The G DATA academy offers companies of all sizes state-of-the-art training & comprehensive knowledge on the topic of cybersecurity. On our interactive platform, employees learn in exciting online courses how to protect themselves and companies from attacks in everyday digital life. Accessible from anywhere, varied and easy to integrate. Our series of training courses specifically on phishing won the Comenius EduMedia Award for digital educational media in mid-2022.