Security awareness training is the process of teaching your employees and leadership to properly recognize and understand cyber threats (awareness) and how to respond to them effectively (security training). If you can truly develop these skills and work them into your corporate culture, you’ll reduce the risk of cyberattacks caused by human error.
An SAT policy, also called a cybersecurity training policy, is a document that defines your responsibilities in terms of providing security awareness training for your people, and their responsibilities to enact these policies consistently and appropriately. The policy guides the training, and the training is intended to produce a workforce that can recognize attempted cyberattacks, social engineering, and other threats to your data and digital processes.
Training like this helps your bottom line by preventing many cyber attacks and reducing the likelihood of others.
Like a security awareness and training policy, a security awareness and acceptable use policy (AUP) focuses on internal behavior. It makes sure your workforce knows how to deal appropriately with data, both on corporate networks and on personal devices used at work.
However, where an SAT seeks to raise awareness of external threats, an AUP seeks to make your people more aware of how they should be using company data and equipment.
An AUP spells out exactly what your people can do with company IT assets, both on your proprietary network and externally. It addresses everything from:
Creating strong passwords and enabling MFA
Making it clear which apps can and cannot be installed on company machines and handheld devices
What devices can connect to corporate networks
Security protocols for remote work and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
To sum up, this policy combines security awareness and acceptable use policy into one.
A security awareness training plan will cover many vectors, and the exact makeup of the plan will depend heavily on your industry and the way you do business. However, it’s difficult to imagine an SAT that does not cover these three main areas:
This training segment explains phishing scams to your workforce and teaches them to recognize suspicious emails and other contacts before engaging with them.
Explaining why multi-factor authentication and strong, unique passwords are “worth the trouble,” and why you should use a password manager instead of a sticky note under your keyboard.
Teaching your people how to report suspicious emails or other anomalies they find to the appropriate IT people for follow-up.
A written security awareness and training policy formalizes your training requirements and supports compliance, whereas a more casual approach encourages cutting corners and non-rigid standards. This written policy should be the foundation of your training and cybersecurity culture. It needs to explain your organizational stance on cybersecurity accurately and precisely. It should be a guide on which you can rely, and to which you can expect others to comply.
A strong SAT policy should include:
Objectives: What the policy sets out to achieve with realistic metrics, like “reduce phishing by X%.”
Audience: Who the training policy is intended for, like all staff or leadership.
Frequency: How often the training policy will be revised, and how often training will be repeated. Consistency is important here, and ideally, the training will be revised quarterly/monthly with reinforcement in an interactive, hands-on manner.
Content scope: The extent to which the policy should be applied, and where it stops—the depth of the information required
Disciplinary consequences: What actually happens when an employee fails to complete training or violates policy.
Make sure that leadership and department heads support and reinforce the security awareness and training policy, or else they will undermine the security culture you’re trying to create. Aim to involve stakeholders early in the policy development so they’re aligned and can help reinforce the importance of training across teams.
Revisit your security awareness and training policy at least annually, or after a major security incident. Not only do new threats constantly demand new procedures, but the way you use and handle data shifts over time as well.
Looking for a turnkey security awareness training solution that complements your internal policy? Huntress SAT is that solution. Our solution is easy to implement and comes with expert-curated content and measurable outcomes to track engagement and effectiveness. Plus, it’s easy to deploy, scales with your team, and reinforces everything your SAT policy outlines. In the end, it forms a perfect complement to a strong internal policy.
Don’t just check a compliance box. Build a smarter, safer, and more security-aware organization with Huntress SAT.
