Cyber Resilience – 5 Ways to Maximize Your Organization’s Resiliency Rate

Security awareness training is a critical component for every organization’s cybersecurity program by helping to improve cyber resilience. To assist organizations with increasing their cyber resilience, Cofense has written a blog post outlining five ways to maximize their resiliency rate.

Security awareness training is critical, it helps cybersecurity professionals better manage human risk by altering how employees think about cybersecurity and teaching them to carefully consider their behaviors. According to Cofense, resiliency rate is an important metric in security awareness training (SAT), as it measures how successful a program has been in preparing employees to recognize and respond to potential threats. Specifically, the resiliency rate is the ratio of users that reported an email, without falling susceptible to it, compared to the total number of susceptible users to that email. By understanding the resiliency rate of a workforce, organizations can better tailor their security awareness training to specific threats and trends, and ultimately create a more effective security awareness training program.

Cofense has created five recommendations for enhancing your organization’s resiliency rate which includes:

1. Focus on creating a positive, rather than punitive, culture around reporting. Empowering your employees to report without fear of repercussion increases reporting rates and improves resiliency.  
2. Prioritize relevancy of simulation content rather than breadth to improve employee detection rates. 
3. Send simulations when employees are active in their inboxes to increase potential for reporting.  
4. Communicate current threats, conduct frequent (recommend monthly) simulations, and follow-up with users who need more conditioning to increase user engagement.  
5. Incorporate rewards and recognition programs for users who report suspected threats to improve morale and foster a culture of reporting. 

Read more at Cofense here.