Cyber Security Awareness Month takes place every October and highlights the importance of raising cyber security awareness.
With a fifth of companies lacking cyber security training, and a cyber attack occuring every 39 seconds on average, there has never been a more crucial time to leverage Cyber Security Awareness Month to kick off cyber security mindsets across your team!
As a vital step in reinforcing a cyber security company culture, training should be fun and rewarding to keep enthusiasm and participation. Interactive, hands-on training usually proves the best results - and that’s where we come in!
Continue reading to discover how to improve cyber security awareness and why training and upskilling your workforce should be vital to building cyber security awareness.
Offensive VS Defensive Security
Offensive and defensive security are crucial pillars of organisational security.
Developing an offensive security mindset across your organisation helps to strengthen your cyber security standing by creating better defence plans. Testing defence controls in an offensive manner from the mindset of a hacker creates a better understanding of how hackers would approach their systems and how preventative measures can be taken.
In contrast, defensive security ensures intrusions are not only prevented but also detected and responded to accordingly if they do occur. Defensive security focuses on reactive measures, aiming to safeguard the organisation in all situations. Frequent reactive measures include patching software, finding and fixing system vulnerabilities, and creating and implementing a combination of security practices.
Offensive Security Training
TryHackMe’s Jr Penetration Testester learning path covers the core technical and practical skills necessary to perform offensive security assessments, while the new Red Team learning path walks you through more advanced topics in offensive security, including how to execute adversary attack emulations.
Users on the TryHackMe Business plan can also take advantage of our business-exclusive Red Team Capstone Challenge Network, the milestone challenge for offensive security professionals and users who have completed our Red Team learning path. As the largest and most comprehensive network created by TryHackMe, the Red Team Capstone Challenge Network (also known as RTC!) has 20 flags to collect, spread across 10 different phases, with 6912 possible path combinations.
Defensive Security Training
Our Cyber Defence learning path teaches you the fundamental components of detecting and responding to threats, including threat and vulnerability management, security operations, incident response and forensics, malware analysis and reverse engineering.
For existing SOC Analysts looking to brush up on their skills and continuously upskill, the SOC Level 1 learning path follows fundamental training, diving into tools and real-world scenarios. The level of detail we explore reflects the needs of Level 1 SOC Analysts - of medium difficulty.
Meanwhile, our brand new SOC Level 2 learning path offers more advanced SOC team training, and can be invaluable to businesses wanting to supercharge their security teams!
Creating Security Champions
Building a cyber culture in your workforce is vital for promoting cyber security awareness for employees and should be integrated to tackle common threats, including:
- Ransomware
- Malware
- Phishing
- Unpatched systems
- Human error
In creating a strong cyber culture, security champions can advance and amplify awareness of cyber security and their expertise throughout the organisation and are vital in instilling the message across teams. Cyber security champions play essential roles in promoting cyber security measures and bridging the cyber security gap.
Employees play an essential role in maintaining security, while 43% are "very" or "pretty" confident they have made a mistake at work with security repercussions. Employees should not only have awareness of cyber security but also feel empowered to learn and work within security practices.
Training Teams
Ongoing cyber security awareness training and upskilling are critical to a cyber culture in the workplace and are invaluable in arming teams with the knowledge and skills to prevent threats and reduce negative implications.
For cyber security teams, continuous upskilling can help to stay on top of new threats and advances to evolve with the fluidity of the industry. The best way for cyber security teams to defend against attacks is to adopt a proactive approach with realistic simulations and continuous training and upskilling.
For non-technical teams, education and awareness are vital in eliminating weaknesses, significantly reducing the likelihood of a breach occurring. Providing cyber security training for your non-technical team will arm them with the knowledge and skills to know what to look out for and the common threats they are likely to face.
Having better cyber security awareness can, in many cases, prevent these threats from taking place.
Today, cyber security is often an invisible part of our life which we take for granted, but we owe it almost everything we have achieved as a civilization.”
TryHackMe Training
Give your team structured learning paths and practical self-paced training to upskill in real-world environments with guided, objective-based tasks and challenges. Use TryHackMe's pre-built courses, or make your own that align with your team's requirements.
We teach cyber security in practice - where you can hack and defend virtual machines in a real-world environment to get realistic, transferable skills in entirely safe surroundings.
Our Cyber Security Awareness module trains your team to become cyber aware and protect your organisation against common security attacks, through interactive real-world scenarios. The training demonstrates what it takes to be security conscious by walking through the most common attacks seen in the industry.
In addition to our training rooms, our Capture The Flags is a competitive challenge whereby users are expected to “capture flags” to increase their score. Users can also try out King of the Hill (KOTH), a competitive hacking game for teams to compromise a machine and patch its vulnerabilities to stop other players from gaining access. Both challenges are a great way to promote competitive spirit and spur learning.
Our training paths explore high-level offensive and defensive content and allow cyber security teams to stay on top of new threats and advances in the industry. This keeps the company safe and structures training in an easily trackable, efficient, and engaging way.
Ben Spring