Back in 2022, Huntress acquired Curricula, the security awareness training platform that we’d been—and still are—using to train our internal teams. Curricula was known for its memorable and effective training episodes, and our team loved following along with the antics of characters like the five-year-old troublemaker, DeeDee. It was clear that Curricula had something special, and given our shared obsession with providing better security solutions for underserved and resource-strapped teams, joining forces was a no-brainer.
Uniting the Curricula platform with the Huntress SOC, which serves over 100,000 small- to medium-sized organizations, afforded us at Huntress a unique opportunity: to build a solution that can elevate the security of these businesses. And thus, Huntress Security Awareness Training (SAT)was born.
Purpose-Built for Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses
For the last two years, we’ve been working tirelessly towards the goal of building a SAT solution tailored to the needs of underserved and resource-strapped organizations. We’re constantly listening to your feedback, iterating on new ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, observing the new trends and tactics used by hackers in the wild. From this, we’ve produced a laundry list of new enhancements for Huntress SAT, with three guiding principles behind each decision we make:
- Admins love it
- Learners love it
- Hackers hate it
Why Admins Love It
Let’s face it, few people actually enjoy managing a security awareness program. Whether you’re creating the entire program in-house or using some cumbersome legacy solution, managing and maintaining a security awareness program requires time, effort, and a level of security expertise that’s expensive to have on staff. And for the most part, these programs don’t lead to better security outcomes. Instead, they lead to complaints from learners, money wasted, and headaches all around. This only gets worse for teams who don’t have a full staff to dedicate to SAT.
We understand that pain, which is why we rolled out a suite of new features in Huntress SAT made specifically with admins in mind:
Full Management
Opt-in for the “set-it-and-forget-it” experience of Huntress Managed Learning and Managed Phishing. All you have to do is onboard your learners, set any exclusions you’d like, toggle it on, and let Huntress take it from there. Your lessons and simulated phishing scenarios can start right away, and it’ll be completely managed by the Huntress team. From creation and curation to scheduling and reminders, there’s no work required on your end.
Easy Onboarding
We’ve made great strides to improve the onboarding experience, reducing onboarding time to just a few minutes. You can take advantage of the Microsoft 365 integration with a quick OAuth-based setup that allows you to sync human learners and ignore non-human accounts. If you’re a managed service provider (MSP), you can also take advantage of optimized multi-tenancy to onboard all of your clients in that same short timeframe.
Monthly Automated Email Reports
At the end of each month, you’ll get a summary of which episodes were assigned, which phishing scenarios were sent, and which learners have incomplete assignments or were compromised by simulated phishing attempts. These reports not only highlight actionable insights, but can help you confidently and quickly prove business, insurance, and regulatory compliance.
Fully Featured Free Trial
Goodbye feature-limited trial experiences. Hello fully featured free trials! The new Huntress SAT free trial experience gives you access to the entire suite of what Huntress SAT has to offer, including the complete library of episodes and phishing simulations. Plus, you even get access to the Custom Content Creator Tool.
Why Learners Love It
If there’s anyone who enjoys a security awareness program less than an exhausted admin, it’s the learners. Most SAT solutions are too long, too boring, too complex, or too infrequent for learners to care or learn anything meaningful. Huntress SAT takes a different approach. Our team of award-winning animators (one team member just won an Emmy®!) leverages the science of learning to create story-based episodes with relatable characters that help learners better internalize and remember the lessons, all without being bored to tears.
Fresh Content on an Ongoing Basis
Rehashing the same episodes is a disservice to both your learners and your organization. It’s important that your security awareness content is updated regularly to keep learners interested and up to date with the evolving threat landscape. That’s why the Huntress team is continually adding new and relevant episodes and simulated phishing scenarios to the library based on today's threats. New episode topics include business email compromise (BEC), malvertising, HIPAA compliance, and more.
No Set-Up Single Sign-On
One of the best ways to get learners to partake in a security awareness program is to remove friction wherever possible. With the ability to log in with their Microsoft credentials with no setup necessary, it's easier than ever for learners to log in to Huntress SAT.
Why Hackers Hate It
Most businesses today have some form of SAT program in place, yet the number of user compromises is still on the rise. Hackers love to see companies using ineffective security awareness programs because learners who aren’t empowered to defend themselves are an easy target for them.
Backed by Real-World Security Practitioners
The same Huntress team that’s managing endpoints and identities for over 100,000 organizations is taking their observations of real-world hacker behaviors and turning them into new episodes and simulated phishing scenarios. For example, when our team observed a rise in QR codes being used in phishing emails (known as Quishing), they were able to create and send out QR code-based simulated phishing scenarios to learners in quick succession. With a team of real-world security practitioners powering your security awareness program, using story-based lessons that’ll actually be retained, you can rest assured that your learners will be empowered with the knowledge to defend against the threats that are most likely to impact your organization.
It’s been quite a journey from the acquisition of Curricula to the product that is Huntress SAT today. And this is just the beginning. We’ll continue to iterate and obsess over delivering a product that provides better security outcomes for underserved and resource-strapped organizations.
If you’re new to Huntress SAT, haven’t looked at it in a while, or are just skeptical that any SAT program can be effective, we invite you to give it a try. Your admins and learners will thank you, but hackers won’t.
