Security awareness training vs. human risk management

You’ve probably heard the terms security awareness and training and human risk management, but what do they mean exactly — and which one should your organization use when trying to reduce overall cyber risk? 

Instead of thinking of them as two separate things, think of them as an evolution organizations tend to follow. It starts with having a nascent program, then establishing and evolving a security awareness training program until you have a mature human risk management program that is behavior-aligned, proactive and adaptive. Look at the graphic below for a quick overview: 

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Read on to learn more about security awareness training versus human risk management and which one is right for your organization. 

What is security awareness training? Key benefits and challenges explained 

Security awareness training focuses on establishing formal processes for teaching employees and other key stakeholders about human errors in cybersecurity and how to avoid them. The goal is to promote a security-conscious culture in your organization by turning potential human vulnerabilities, your employees, into one of your strongest threat-defeating assets.  

Key benefits of security awareness training: 

• Fewer cyberattacks. When you teach employees which threats to look out for, you reduce the chances of an attacker catching them off guard. 

• Better compliance. Many industries already have regulatory requirements around security awareness training, so implementing this now can help avoid significant compliance issues. 

• Stronger data protection. By giving your employees the training they need to understand the different types of data, their value to attackers and how to prevent breaches, your overall data safety gets a much-needed boost. 

• Relatively inexpensive security improvement. Employees armed with the knowledge they need to prevent attacks can lead to a proven ROI of security awareness training. With the average cost of a U.S. data breach exceeding $9.2 million, reducing the risk from the human element is an important part of cyber risk management. 

The challenges of security awareness training: 

While the benefits of training your employees are well worth any effort, it's important to also keep in mind some of the challenges you might face, including: 

• Keeping employees engaged. Your training content should be interactive, insightful and readily applicable to employees' job duties. In this way, you keep everyone engaged. 

• Limited time. Employees are busy, and cybersecurity isn’t their specialty. That's why it's important to choose a program that imbues the most knowledge in a reasonable amount of time and embraces proven learning methodologies, such as ongoing micro-learning instead of once-a-year training delivered in bulk. 

• Staying ahead of the most recent threats. Threats change daily, and while there is plenty of information available about older attack methods, it can be difficult to identify the most recent threat intel and mitigation strategies. 

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What is human risk management? 

Human risk management refers to systematically addressing the risks associated with human risk in business. In the context of this human risk management definition, the human element is involved in nearly seven out of 10 data breaches. Cybersecurity human risk management takes this challenge head-on. To do so, human risk management focuses on the risks associated with each facet of the employee lifecycle, from onboarding to when their tenure is up with your organization. 

Components of human risk management 

Human risk management consists of a few core components, and by focusing on each one, you can scaffold your human risk management strategy. The most important components include: 

• Identifying the risks facing your organization. These may involve social engineering tactics like phishing, negligence around access credentials or even internal malicious actors. This can come from your own real-world alert data. 

• Assessing the likelihood of each risk. Some risks, such as phishing, are likely in many organizations. Others are more organization — or industry-specific, like inadequate cyber hygiene around VPN credentials. 

• Identifying the impact of each risk. The impact of each risk depends on your digital environment and operations. For example, a lawyer divulging access credentials would have different implications than a nurse. 

• Risk feedback and mitigation. This often involves immediate training delivered via employee communication channels, such as Slack or email. For example, an alert can be generated when an employee clicks on a suspicious link, allowing the security team to investigate while the employee gets an in-the-moment training reminder about the dangers of clicking unknown links.  

• Continually monitoring the effectiveness of your program and then adjusting. You can constantly evaluate and improve your human risk management system by establishing metrics, such as the number of human errors during a penetration test. 

Platforms and tools 

Security awareness training platforms and tools streamline the process of delivering knowledge and skills to your employees. For example, many organizations turn to: 

• Companies that provide cybersecurity training and certifications give your employees focused, deep knowledge in relatively little time. 

• Phishing simulation software. You can use software that simulates phishing attacks and see how employees respond when under assault. 

• Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software. GRC software gives you tools that centralize your risk of human error introducing compliance and other cyber risks. 

Comparing security awareness training and human risk management 

Security awareness and human risk management often intersect, but they're two very different things. Here's a simple breakdown of the key differences: 

Focus and scope 

The focus of security awareness training and human risk management can often look very different: 

• Security awareness training is limited to educating employees regarding cyber threats and the best practices they can use to mitigate the associated risks. 

• Human risk management, on the other hand, includes unintentional actions as well, such as leaving workstations unattended or not deleting former employees' access credentials. 

The same goes for the scope of each methodology. For example, with security awareness training, you may educate a broad swath of your employees on the most common threats. However, with human risk management, you may want to focus on only one department at a time. For instance, your human risk management program may teach your development team about the kinds of vulnerabilities associated with databases, such as different ways hackers can use SQL injection to take advantage of the code your team writes. 

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Objectives and goals 

The goals of security awareness training are often relatively high-level, while human risk management tends to have more specific goals. 

To illustrate, security awareness training may have the goal of reducing the number of employees who click on links to malicious sites. A human risk management program, by contrast, may have the goal of identifying every major risk associated with your sales department and then equipping them to reduce or mitigate them. 

Target audience 

Security awareness training tends to have a wider, more general target audience. It could include all employees, for example, or, in some cases, be designed for only new employees during the onboarding process. 

Human risk management often hones in on specific groups of employees. By identifying the risks most closely associated with those groups — and how to mitigate them, a human risk management system often achieves better results than a general security awareness program. 

Methods and techniques 

Security awareness training may only involve a relatively shallow selection of techniques and tools, such as online learning modules and cybersecurity quizzes. 

Human risk management tends to involve a wider array of tools because the choice and design of each tool depend on the needs of the organization and target audience. For instance, rather than only instilling employees with knowledge, a human risk management program can also include setting up new access controls and establishing password management policies. 

The intersection of security awareness training and human risk management 

Security awareness training and human risk management work hand in hand, particularly because security awareness is a foundational element of human risk management. You can think of security awareness training as the "what" and human risk management as the "how." 

Security awareness and training teach employees what they need to look out for and what they need to do. Human risk management shows employees and managers how to mitigate risk by providing tools and systemic adjustments to policies. 

In this context, the how can't be successful without the what. For instance, a human risk management program could teach employees how to avoid insider threats, such as attackers looking to take advantage of unsecured sessions on open workstations. But the team needs to first understand what makes this threat so dangerous. For instance, as preparation for a human risk management program, security awareness training can teach your teams about the dangers of privilege escalation. It could also outline how easy it is to escalate privileges once someone has connected to an app you've already logged into. 

With this knowledge, the team would understand the value of the tools and approaches outlined in the subsequent human risk management program. 

Choosing the right approach 

The approach you choose depends on the risks you're trying to mitigate, but in many situations, it's best to use a combination of both that evolves over time.

For example, you may have a relatively tech-savvy team that already understands basic cyber threats, such as denial of service attacks, brute force attacks and whale phishing. In that case, they may snore through a security awareness training session about common cyber threats. 

On the other hand, they may have little to no knowledge about machine learning (ML) poisoning or living off the land (LotL) attacks. So, starting with the best security awareness training topics around these methods may be a good start. For instance, to address machine learning poisoning, you can establish systems for evaluating and verifying the quality and safety of the datasets your organization uses to train its ML models. 

You can also teach your teams how to use outlier detection tools to flag malicious training data filled with dangerous perturbations. 

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Future trends 

The future of human risk management programs will involve regularly updating and refining them to stay ahead of the latest AI-built and -focused attacks. The speed at which AI is evolving is exciting and sobering, and human risk management programs will introduce greater adaptability to pivot in time to mitigate new risks. 

While high-quality, focused training programs are already in vogue, they will continue to rise to the top of many human risk management leaders' lists of options. You can give your employees all they need to know and specific action steps to drastically reduce your threat risk by implementing some of these more mature human risk management techniques.