Developing secure products and services is imperative for organizations that are looking to strengthen operational resilience and build customer trust. However, system design often prioritizes performance, functionality, and user experience over security. This approach can lead to vulnerabilities across the supply chain.
As security threats continue to evolve, the concept of Secure by Design (SbD) is gaining importance in the effort to mitigate vulnerabilities early, minimize risks, and recognize security as a core business requirement. We’re excited to share a whitepaper we recently authored with SANS Institute called Building Security from the Ground up with Secure by Design, which addresses SbD strategy and explores the effects of SbD implementations.
The whitepaper contains context and analysis that can help you take a proactive approach to product development that facilitates foundational security. Key considerations include the following:
Integrating SbD into the software development lifecycle (SDLC)
Supporting SbD with automation
Reinforcing defense-in-depth
Applying SbD to artificial intelligence (AI)
Identifying threats in the design phase with threat modeling
Using SbD to simplify compliance with requirements and standards
Planning for the short and long term
Establishing a culture of security
While the journey to a Secure by Design approach is an iterative process that is different for every organization, the whitepaper details five key action items that can help set you on the right path. We encourage you to download the whitepaper and gain insight into how you can build secure products with a multi-layered strategy that meaningfully improves your technical and business outcomes. We look forward to your feedback and to continuing the journey together.
AWS re:Invent drew 52,000 attendees from across the globe to Las Vegas, Nevada, November 27 to December 1, 2023.
Now in its 12th year, the conference featured 5 keynotes, 17 innovation talks, and over 2,250 sessions and hands-on labs offering immersive learning and networking opportunities.
With dozens of service and feature announcements—and innumerable best practices shared by AWS executives, customers, and partners—the air of excitement was palpable. We were on site to experience all of the innovations and insights, but summarizing highlights isn’t easy. This post details three key security themes that caught our attention.
Security culture
When we think about cybersecurity, it’s natural to focus on technical security measures that help protect the business. But organizations are made up of people—not technology. The best way to protect ourselves is to foster a proactive, resilient culture of cybersecurity that supports effective risk mitigation, incident detection and response, and continuous collaboration.
In Sustainable security culture: Empower builders for success, AWS Global Services Security Vice President Hart Rossman and AWS Global Services Security Organizational Excellence Leader Sarah Currey presented practical strategies for building a sustainable security culture.
Rossman noted that many customers who meet with AWS about security challenges are attempting to manage security as a project, a program, or a side workstream. To strengthen your security posture, he said, you have to embed security into your business.
“You’ve got to understand early on that security can’t be effective if you’re running it like a project or a program. You really have to run it as an operational imperative—a core function of the business. That’s when magic can happen.” — Hart Rossman, Global Services Security Vice President at AWS
Three best practices can help:
Be consistently persistent. Routinely and emphatically thank employees for raising security issues. It might feel repetitive, but treating security events and escalations as learning opportunities helps create a positive culture—and it’s a practice that can spread to other teams. An empathetic leadership approach encourages your employees to see security as everyone’s responsibility, share their experiences, and feel like collaborators.
Brief the board. Engage executive leadership in regular, business-focused meetings. By providing operational metrics that tie your security culture to the impact that it has on customers, crisply connecting data to business outcomes, and providing an opportunity to ask questions, you can help build the support of executive leadership, and advance your efforts to establish a sustainable proactive security posture.
Have a mental model for creating a good security culture. Rossman presented a diagram (Figure 1) that highlights three elements of security culture he has observed at AWS: a student, a steward, and a builder. If you want to be a good steward of security culture, you should be a student who is constantly learning, experimenting, and passing along best practices. As your stewardship grows, you can become a builder, and progress the culture in new directions.
Figure 1: Sample mental model for building security culture
Thoughtful investment in the principles of inclusivity, empathy, and psychological safety can help your team members to confidently speak up, take risks, and express ideas or concerns. This supports an escalation-friendly culture that can reduce employee burnout, and empower your teams to champion security at scale.
Rodgers highlighted three pillars of progression (Figure 2)—aware, bolted-on, and embedded—that are based on meetings with more than 800 customers. As organizations mature from a reactive security posture to a proactive, security-first approach, he noted, security culture becomes a true business enabler.
“When organizations have a strong security culture and everyone sees security as their responsibility, they can move faster and achieve quicker and more secure product and service releases.” — Clarke Rodgers, Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS
Figure 2: Shipping with a security-first mindset
Human-centric AI
CISOs and security stakeholders are increasingly pivoting to a human-centric focus to establish effective cybersecurity, and ease the burden on employees.
According to Gartner, by 2027, 50% of large enterprise CISOs will have adopted human-centric security design practices to minimize cybersecurity-induced friction and maximize control adoption.
As Amazon CSO Stephen Schmidt noted in Move fast, stay secure: Strategies for the future of security, focusing on technology first is fundamentally wrong. Security is a people challenge for threat actors, and for defenders. To keep up with evolving changes and securely support the businesses we serve, we need to focus on dynamic problems that software can’t solve.
Maintaining that focus means providing security and development teams with the tools they need to automate and scale some of their work.
“People are our most constrained and most valuable resource. They have an impact on every layer of security. It’s important that we provide the tools and the processes to help our people be as effective as possible.” — Stephen Schmidt, CSO at Amazon
Organizations can use artificial intelligence (AI) to impact all layers of security—but AI doesn’t replace skilled engineers. When used in coordination with other tools, and with appropriate human review, it can help make your security controls more effective.
Schmidt highlighted the internal use of AI at Amazon to accelerate our software development process, as well as new generative AI-powered Amazon Inspector, Amazon Detective, AWS Config, and Amazon CodeWhisperer features that complement the human skillset by helping people make better security decisions, using a broader collection of knowledge. This pattern of combining sophisticated tooling with skilled engineers is highly effective, because it positions people to make the nuanced decisions required for effective security that AI can’t make on its own.
In How security teams can strengthen security using generative AI, AWS Senior Security Specialist Solutions Architects Anna McAbee and Marshall Jones, and Principal Consultant Fritz Kunstler featured a virtual security assistant (chatbot) that can address common security questions and use cases based on your internal knowledge bases, and trusted public sources.
The generative AI-powered solution depicted in Figure 3—which includes Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with Amazon Kendra, Amazon Security Lake, and Amazon Bedrock—can help you automate mundane tasks, expedite security decisions, and increase your focus on novel security problems.
It’s available on Github with ready-to-use code, so you can start experimenting with a variety of large and multimodal language models, settings, and prompts in your own AWS account.
Secure collaboration
Collaboration is key to cybersecurity success, but evolving threats, flexible work models, and a growing patchwork of data protection and privacy regulations have made maintaining secure and compliant messaging a challenge.
An estimated 3.09 billion mobile phone users access messaging apps to communicate, and this figure is projected to grow to 3.51 billion users in 2025.
The use of consumer messaging apps for business-related communications makes it more difficult for organizations to verify that data is being adequately protected and retained. This can lead to increased risk, particularly in industries with unique recordkeeping requirements.
In How the U.S. Army uses AWS Wickr to deliver lifesaving telemedicine, Matt Quinn, Senior Director at The U.S. Army Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), Laura Baker, Senior Manager at Deloitte, and Arvind Muthukrishnan, AWS Wickr Head of Product highlighted how The TATRC National Emergency Tele-Critical Care Network (NETCCN) was integrated with AWS Wickr—a HIPAA-eligible secure messaging and collaboration service—and AWS Private 5G, a managed service for deploying and scaling private cellular networks.
During the session, Quinn, Baker, and Muthukrishnan described how TATRC achieved a low-resource, cloud-enabled, virtual health solution that facilitates secure collaboration between onsite and remote medical teams for real-time patient care in austere environments. Using Wickr, medics on the ground were able to treat injuries that exceeded their previous training (Figure 4) with the help of end-to-end encrypted video calls, messaging, and file sharing with medical professionals, and securely retain communications in accordance with organizational requirements.
“Incorporating Wickr into Military Emergency Tele-Critical Care Platform (METTC-P) not only provides the security and privacy of end-to-end encrypted communications, it gives combat medics and other frontline caregivers the ability to gain instant insight from medical experts around the world—capabilities that will be needed to address the simultaneous challenges of prolonged care, and the care of large numbers of casualties on the multi-domain operations (MDO) battlefield.” — Matt Quinn, Senior Director at TATRC
Figure 4: Telemedicine workflows using AWS Wickr
In a separate Chalk Talk titled Bolstering Incident Response with AWS Wickr and Amazon EventBridge, Senior AWS Wickr Solutions Architects Wes Wood and Charles Chowdhury-Hanscombe demonstrated how to integrate Wickr with Amazon EventBridge and Amazon GuardDuty to strengthen incident response capabilities with an integrated workflow (Figure 5) that connects your AWS resources to Wickr bots. Using this approach, you can quickly alert appropriate stakeholders to critical findings through a secure communication channel, even on a potentially compromised network.
Figure 5: AWS Wickr integration for incident response communications
Security is our top priority
AWS re:Invent featured many more highlights on a variety of topics, including adaptive access control with Zero Trust, AWS cyber insurance partners, Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels’ popular keynote, and the security partnerships showcased on the Expo floor. It was a whirlwind experience, but one thing is clear: AWS is working hard to help you build a security-first mindset, so that you can meaningfully improve both technical and business outcomes.
Effective collaboration is central to business success, and employees today depend heavily on messaging tools. An estimated 3.09 billion mobile phone users access messaging applications (apps) to communicate, and this figure is projected to grow to 3.51 billion users in 2025.
This post highlights the risks associated with messaging apps and describes how you can use enterprise solutions — such as AWS Wickr — that combine end-to-end encryption with data retention to drive positive security and business outcomes.
The business risks of messaging apps
Evolving threats, flexible work models, and a growing patchwork of data protection and privacy regulations have made maintaining secure and compliant enterprise messaging a challenge.
The use of third-party apps for business-related messages on both corporate and personal devices can make it more difficult to verify that data is being adequately protected and retained. This can lead to business risk, particularly in industries with unique record-keeping requirements. Organizations in the financial services industry, for example, are subject to rules that include Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a-4 and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Rule 3120, which require them to preserve all pertinent electronic communications.
A recent Gartner report on the viability of mobile bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs noted, “It is now logical to assume that most financial services organizations with mobile BYOD programs for regulated employees could be fined due to a lack of compliance with electronic communications regulations.”
In the public sector, U.S. government agencies are subject to records requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and various state sunshine statutes. For these organizations, effectively retaining business messages is about more than supporting security and compliance—it’s about maintaining public trust.
Securing enterprise messaging
Enterprise-grade messaging apps can help you protect communications from unauthorized access and facilitate desired business outcomes.
Security — Critical security protocols protect messages and files that contain sensitive and proprietary data — such as personally identifiable information, protected health information, financial records, and intellectual property — in transit and at rest to decrease the likelihood of a security incident.
Control — Administrative controls allow you to add, remove, and invite users, and organize them into security groups with restricted access to features and content at their level. Passwords can be reset and profiles can be deleted remotely, helping you reduce the risk of data exposure stemming from a lost or stolen device.
Compliance — Information can be preserved in a customer-controlled data store to help meet requirements such as those that fall under the Federal Records Act (FRA) and National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), as well as SEC Rule 17a-4 and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).
Marrying encryption with data retention
Enterprise solutions bring end-to-end encryption and data retention together in support of a comprehensive approach to secure messaging that balances people, process, and technology.
End-to-end encryption
Many messaging apps offer some form of encryption, but not all of them use end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is a secure communication method that protects data from unauthorized access, interception, or tampering as it travels from one endpoint to another.
In end-to-end encryption, encryption and decryption take place locally, on the device. Every call, message, and file is encrypted with unique keys and remains indecipherable in transit. Unauthorized parties cannot access communication content because they don’t have the keys required to decrypt the data.
Encryption in transit compared to end-to-end encryption
Encryption in transit encrypts data over a network from one point to another (typically between one client and one server); data might remain stored in plaintext at the source and destination storage systems. End-to-end encryption combines encryption in transit and encryption at rest to secure data at all times, from being generated and leaving the sender’s device, to arriving at the recipient’s device and being decrypted.
“Messaging is a critical tool for any organization, and end-to-end encryption is the security technology that provides organizations with the confidence they need to rely on it.” — CJ Moses, CISO and VP of Security Engineering at AWS
Data retention
While data retention is often thought of as being incompatible with end-to-end encryption, leading enterprise-grade messaging apps offer both, giving you the option to configure a data store of your choice to retain conversations without exposing them to outside parties. No one other than the intended recipients and your organization has access to the message content, giving you full control over your data.
How AWS can help
AWS Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service that was built from the ground up with features designed to help you keep internal and external communications secure, private, and compliant. Wickr protects one-to-one and group messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and location sharing with 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, and provides data retention capabilities.
Figure 1: How Wickr works
With Wickr, each message gets a unique AES private encryption key, and a unique Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) public key to negotiate the key exchange with recipients. Message content — including text, files, audio, or video — is encrypted on the sending device (your iPhone, for example) using the message-specific AES key. This key is then exchanged via the ECDH key exchange mechanism, so that only intended recipients can decrypt the message.
“As former employees of federal law enforcement, the intelligence community, and the military, Qintel understands the need for enterprise-federated, secure communication messaging capabilities. When searching for our company’s messaging application we evaluated the market thoroughly and while there are some excellent capabilities available, none of them offer the enterprise security and administrative flexibility that Wickr does.” — Bill Schambura, CEO at Qintel
Wickr network administrators can configure and apply data retention to both internal and external communications in a Wickr network. This includes conversations with guest users, external teams, and other partner networks, so you can retain messages and files sent to and from the organization to help meet internal, legal, and regulatory requirements.
Figure 2: Data retention process
Data retention is implemented as an always-on recipient that is added to conversations, not unlike the blind carbon copy (BCC) feature in email. The data-retention process participates in the key exchange, allowing it to decrypt messages. The process can run anywhere: on-premises, on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, or at a location of your choice.
Wickr networks can be created through the AWS Management Console, and workflows can be automated with Wickr bots. Wickr is currently available in the AWS US East (Northern Virginia), AWS GovCloud (US-West), AWS Canada (Central), and AWS Europe (London) Regions.
Keep your messages safe
Employees will continue to use messaging apps to chat with friends and family, and boost productivity at work. While many of these apps can introduce risks if not used properly in business settings, Wickr combines end-to-end encryption with data-retention capabilities to help you achieve security and compliance goals. Incorporating Wickr into a comprehensive approach to secure enterprise messaging that includes clear policies and security awareness training can help you to accelerate collaboration, while protecting your organization’s data.
The United States Government recently launched its National Cybersecurity Strategy. The Strategy outlines the administration’s ambitious vision for building a more resilient future, both in the United States and around the world, and it affirms the key role cloud computing plays in realizing this vision.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is broadly committed to working with customers, partners, and governments such as the United States to improve cybersecurity. That longstanding commitment aligns with the goals of the National Cybersecurity Strategy. In this blog post, we will summarize the Strategy and explain how AWS will help to realize its vision.
The Strategy identifies two fundamental shifts in how the United States allocates cybersecurity roles, responsibilities, and resources. First, the Strategy calls for a shift in cybersecurity responsibility away from individuals and organizations with fewer resources, toward larger technology providers that are the most capable and best-positioned to be successful. At AWS, we recognize that our success and scale bring broad responsibility. We are committed to improving cybersecurity outcomes for our customers, our partners, and the world at large.
Second, the Strategy calls for realigning incentives to favor long-term investments in a resilient future. As part of our culture of ownership, we are long-term thinkers, and we don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. For more than fifteen years, AWS has delivered security, identity, and compliance services for millions of active customers around the world. We recognize that we operate in a complicated global landscape and dynamic threat environment that necessitates a dynamic approach to security. Innovation and long-term investments have been and will continue to be at the core of our approach, and we continue to innovate to build and improve on our security and the services we offer customers.
AWS is working to enhance cybersecurity outcomes in ways that align with each of the Strategy’s five pillars:
Defend Critical Infrastructure — Customers, partners, and governments need confidence that they are migrating to and building on a secure cloud foundation. AWS is architected to have the most flexible and secure cloud infrastructure available today, and our customers benefit from the data centers, networks, custom hardware, and secure software layers that we have built to satisfy the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. Our cloud infrastructure is secure by design and secure by default, and our infrastructure and services meet the high bar that the United States Government and other customers set for security.
Disrupt and Dismantle Threat Actors — At AWS, our paramount focus on security leads us to implement important measures to prevent abuse of our services and products. Some of the measures we undertake to deter, detect, mitigate, and prevent abuse of AWS products include examining new registrations for potential fraud or identity falsification, employing service-level containment strategies when we detect unusual behavior, and helping protect critical systems and sensitive data against ransomware. Amazon is also working with government to address these threats, including by serving as one of the first members of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC). Amazon is also co-leading a study with the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee on addressing the abuse of domestic infrastructure by foreign malicious actors.
Shape Market Forces to Drive Security and Resilience — At AWS, security is our top priority. We continuously innovate based on customer feedback, which helps customer organizations to accelerate their pace of innovation while integrating top-tier security architecture into the core of their business and operations. For example, AWS co-founded the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project, which facilitates interoperability and data normalization between security products. We are contributing to the quality and safety of open-source software both by direct contributions to open-source projects and also by an initial commitment of $10 million in a variety of open-source security improvement projects in and through the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).
Invest in a Resilient Future — Cybersecurity skills training, workforce development, and education on next-generation technologies are essential to addressing cybersecurity challenges. That’s why we are making significant investments to help make it simpler for people to gain the skills they need to grow their careers, including in cybersecurity. Amazon is committing more than $1.2 billion to provide no-cost education and skills training opportunities to more than 300,000 of our own employees in the United States, to help them secure new, high-growth jobs. Amazon is also investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide no-cost cloud computing skills training to 29 million people around the world. We will continue to partner with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and others in government to develop the cybersecurity workforce.
Forge International Partnerships to Pursue Shared Goals — AWS is working with governments around the world to provide innovative solutions that advance shared goals such as bolstering cyberdefenses and combating security risks. For example, we are supporting international forums such as the Organization of American States to build security capacity across the hemisphere. We encourage the administration to look toward internationally recognized, risk-based cybersecurity frameworks and standards to strengthen consistency and continuity of security among interconnected sectors and throughout global supply chains. Increased adoption of these standards and frameworks, both domestically and internationally, will mitigate cyber risk while facilitating economic growth.
AWS shares the Biden administration’s cybersecurity goals and is committed to partnering with regulators and customers to achieve them. Collaboration between the public sector and industry has been central to US cybersecurity efforts, fueled by the recognition that the owners and operators of technology must play a key role. As the United States Government moves forward with implementation of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, we look forward to redoubling our efforts and welcome continued engagement with all stakeholders—including the United States Government, our international partners, and industry collaborators. Together, we can address the most difficult cybersecurity challenges, enhance security outcomes, and build toward a more secure and resilient future.
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AWS is excited to announce a new eBook, 5 Keys to Secure Enterprise Messaging. The new eBook includes best practices for addressing the security and compliance risks associated with messaging apps.
An estimated 3.09 billion mobile phone users access messaging apps to communicate, and this figure is projected to grow to 3.51 billion users in 2025.
Legal and regulatory requirements for data protection, privacy, and data retention have made protecting business communications a priority for organizations across the globe. Although consumer messaging apps are convenient and support real-time communication with colleagues, customers, and partners, they often lack the robust security and administrative controls many businesses require.
The eBook details five keys to secure enterprise messaging that balance people, process, and technology.
We encourage you to read the eBook, and learn about:
Establishing messaging policies and guidelines that are effective for your workforce
Training employees to use messaging apps in a way that doesn’t increase organizational risk
Building a security-first culture
Using true end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to secure communications
Retaining data to help meet requirements, without exposing it to outside parties
As Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to a close, we want to share some of the work we’ve done and made available to you throughout October. Over the last four weeks, we have shared insights and resources aligned with this year’s theme—”See Yourself in Cyber”—to help advance awareness training, and inspire people to join the rapidly growing security industry. Here are a few highlights.
Roundtable with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA): Amazon Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt hosted CISA director Jen Easterly in Seattle for a roundtable with leaders across higher education, state and local government, and private industry to discuss ways to develop the cybersecurity workforce through skills training, partnerships between government and industry, and creating pathways to cybersecurity careers.
How AWS, Cisco, Netflix & SAP Are Approaching Cybersecurity Awareness Month. I joined Cisco Chief Security and Trust Officer Brad Arkin, Netflix Head of Cloud Security Srinath Kuruvardi, and SAP Chief Trust Officer Elena Kvochko to describe how AWS, Cisco, Netflix, and SAP are instilling strong cybersecurity training and practices within our organizations, with the goal of inspiring other organizations to do the same.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2022 Briefing. Amazon Security Director Jenny Brinkley—who leads Amazon’s internal and external awareness training activities—participated in a Cybersecurity Awareness Month panel discussion hosted by the National Cybersecurity Alliance. Jenny met with executives from KnowBe4, Google, NortonLifeLock, and Dell and chatted about how the cybersecurity landscape has changed over the past few years, and how those changes have impacted the perception of security as a part of daily life.
Making Cybersecurity Relevant for Consumers: The Case for Personal Agency. In addition to the briefing, Jenny spoke to the National Cybersecurity Alliance about staying safe online. She highlighted simple steps that everyone can take to be safer online, including staying consistent on software updates for connected devices, using strong passwords, activating multi-factor authentication (MFA) on accounts when possible, and being on the lookout for phishing attempts.
National Cybersecurity Alliance and Nasdaq Cybersecurity Summit. Jenny and Amazon Head of Global Security Training Jyllian Clarke also joined the National Cybersecurity Alliance, Nasdaq, and public and private sector security leaders in New York City for a cybersecurity summit and got to ring the opening bell.
Resources
AWS offers free Cybersecurity Awareness Training to individuals and businesses around the world, and we’re providing complimentary MFA security keys to AWS account owners in the United States. More than 40 security-focused courses are available through AWS Skill Builder, ranging from foundational to advanced content. By subscribing to AWS Skill Builder, you gain access to security-related interactive challenges with AWS Jam, which guides you through solving real-world problems.
Additionally, Amazon and the National Cybersecurity Alliance launched a cybersecurity awareness campaign called Protect & Connect. The campaign includes a public service announcement featuring Prime Video actor Michael B. Jordan and actress-producer Tessa Thompson as “internet bodyguards,” as well as a Protect & Connect microsite for consumers, featuring additional videos on topics such as MFA and how to identify and avoid phishing attempts.
Humanizing security
Cybersecurity can seem like a complex subject but ultimately, it’s all about people. Most of today’s threats need people to activate them, so you need to train people to develop intuition, which is something that can’t be automated. By meeting employees where they are with an engaging approach to awareness training that moves security to the forefront of everything they do, you can promote positive behavioral change, and start building a security-first culture.
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Raising the bar on cybersecurity starts with education. That’s why we announced in August that Amazon is making its internal Cybersecurity Awareness Training Program available to businesses and individuals for free starting this month. This is the same annual training we provide our employees to help them better understand and anticipate potential cybersecurity risks. The training program will include a getting started guide to help you implement a cybersecurity awareness training program at your organization. It’s aligned with NIST SP 800-53rev4, ISO 27001, K-ISMS, RSEFT, IRAP, OSPAR, and MCTS.
I also want to share a few key learnings for how to implement effective cybersecurity training programs that might be helpful as you develop your own training program:
Be sure to articulate personal value. As humans, we have an evolved sense of physical risk that has developed over thousands of years. Our bodies respond when we sense danger, heightening our senses and getting us ready to run or fight. We have a far less developed sense of cybersecurity risk. Your vision doesn’t sharpen when you assign the wrong permissions to a resource, for example. It can be hard to describe the impact of cybersecurity, but if you keep the message personal, it engages parts of the brain that are tied to deep emotional triggers in memory. When we describe how learning a behavior—like discerning when an email might be phishing—can protect your family, your child’s college fund, or your retirement fund, it becomes more apparent why cybersecurity matters.
Be inclusive. Humans are best at learning when they share a lived experience with their educators so they can make authentic connections to their daily lives. That’s why inclusion in cybersecurity training is a must. But that only happens by investing in a cybersecurity awareness team that includes people with different backgrounds, so they can provide insight into different approaches that will resonate with diverse populations. People from different cultures, backgrounds, and age cohorts can provide insight into culturally specific attack patterns as well as how to train for them. For example, for social engineering in hierarchical cultures, bad actors often spoof authority figures, and for individualistic cultures, they play to the target’s knowledge and importance, and give compliments. And don’t forget to make everything you do accessible for people with varying disability experiences, because everyone deserves the same high-quality training experience. The more you connect with people, the more they internalize your message and provide valuable feedback. Diversity and inclusion breeds better cybersecurity.
Weave it into workflows. Training takes investment. You have to make time for it in your day. We all understand that as part of a workforce we have to do it, but in addition to compliance training, you should be providing just-in-time reminders and challenges to complete. Try working with tooling teams to display messaging when critical tasks are being completed. Make training short and concise—3 minutes at most—so that people can make time for it in their day.
Cybersecurity training isn’t just a once-per-year exercise. Find ways to weave it into the daily lives of your workforce, and you’ll be helping them protect not only your company, but themselves and their loved ones as well.
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