How PhishCloud PHISH360° Accelerates the SANS Security Awareness Maturity Model
anti phishing training
How PhishCloud PHISH360° Accelerates the SANS Security Awareness Maturity Model
In the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, employee awareness and vigilance are increasingly recognized as the first line of defense against a variety of cyber threats, particularly phishing attacks. According to the SANS Security Awareness Maturity Model, organizations can assess and enhance their security awareness programs through five stages, from ad hoc or compliance focused efforts to fully optimized, behavior-driven initiatives. A key element of any successful security awareness program is the ability to continuously evaluate, educate, and engage employees in practical ways, ensuring that they can identify and respond to the latest cyber threats.
PhishCloud PHISH360° has a cutting-edge phishing defense solution that helps organizations strengthen their cyber defenses by improving employees’ ability to recognize and respond to phishing attempts and social engineering attacks. By aligning its features with the SANS Security Awareness Maturity Model, PHISH360° can evolve from a basic phishing simulation tool into a comprehensive and strategic element of an organization’s broader security awareness program.
In this blog article, we will explore how PHISH360° adapts at each stage of the SANS Security Awareness Maturity Model, and how its features can support organizations in progressing toward higher maturity levels with greater efficiency and less operational overhead.
The SANS Security Awareness Maturity Model
Before diving into how PHISH360° can fit within this model, it’s important to understand the key stages of maturity outlined by SANS. The Security Awareness Maturity Model defines five levels, each representing a different phase of an organization’s security awareness program. These stages are:
- Non-Existent – Uncoordinated, reactive security awareness efforts.
- Compliance Oriented – A minimal program motivated by satisfying perceived compliance needs that consists of sporadic training backed by employee tracking metrics, just enough to satisfy an audit.
- Promoting Awareness & Behavioral Change – A program that goes beyond just annual training where content is communicated in an engaging and positive manner that encourages behavior change.
- Long Term Sustainment & Culture Change – A program that has the processes, resources, and leadership support required to become an established part of your organization’s culture.
- Metrics Framework – A robust metrics framework aligned with the organization’s security mission to easily demonstrate measurable impact.
As we’ll explore, PHISH360° can be an invaluable tool that adapts and evolves to meet the needs of an organization at each of these stages, providing both scalability and flexibility.
Nonexistent Stage
At this stage, security awareness efforts are often sporadic and reactive, with little formalization. Employees may be unaware of the risks posed by phishing attacks, and any training tends to be event-driven (such as after a security incident or breach). Organizations in this phase typically don’t have established goals or metrics for security awareness, primarily due to a lack of ownership. Staffing or resource allocation has yet to be provided, so the responsibility falls onto the security team as an additional layer to their full plate of existing responsibility
How PhishCloud PHISH360° Fits the Initial Stage:
- Easy to Deploy: PHISH360° allows security teams to automate real-time visibility into employee click-behavior without the overhead of having to run a single simulation. Organizations with limited resources gain immediate awareness to phishing risk by simply adding cloud-native protection at the endpoint.
- Baseline Vulnerability Metrics: The platform generates reports based upon actual phishing risk exposure before any training simulations or training content is launched, delivering upon a mission to baseline human behaviors and actual click activity with suspicious URLs. Even at this initial stage, potential areas of vulnerability within the organization are identifiable beyond just traditional email, gaining an increased surface area coverage unmatched by any single solution on the market today.
- Basic Training Integration: PHISH360° provides access to educational content and simulation automation to optimize resource efficiency for the fastest time to market with your security awareness program launch. This foundational training is key to moving the organization toward a more mature awareness program.
Compliance Readiness: PHISH360° can deliver bespoke compliance reports having continuous visibility of phishing risk exposure across your enterprise. There is instant access to quizzes, surveys and customized reporting that can be tailored to your GRC and audit requirements.
Compliance Focused Stage
At this foundational stage before committing any material program resources, organizations begin to formalize their security awareness initiatives. This includes setting goals, defining expectations, building mission alignment with executive support and tracking performance over time. While the program is beginning to have structure, it may still be reactive in nature with periodic simulation support and limited content personalization. Employee education is a priority with this stage along with initiating cross-team operational alignment.
How PHISH360° Fits the Compliance Stage:
- Positive Employee Engagement: Security Awareness and Training teams are oftentimes embattled against employee discomfort with business productivity loss or negative perceptions towards testing. At the onset of launching PHISH360°, employees gain the benefit of immediate participation and inclusion of the security mission. With easy to understand visual indicators of phishing risk embedded within their daily workflow, they are empowered to assist with phishing risk detection.
- Operational Security Alignment: PHISH360°’s continuous visibility into malicious link exposure has the powerful effect of bridging together both security awareness training goals with an increase in SecOps operational efficiency. Missions and goals to increase the enterprise security posture are aligned by having common tracking metrics, increased visibility on actual phishing risk and resource optimization when launching simulations.
Enhanced Metrics: Organizations need to track more granular performance metrics, oftentimes running multiple simulations to expose the “usual suspects”, the repeat offenders who fail simulation events. Understanding and identifying what types of training to prioritize is also time consuming as organizations rarely have direct visibility into the types of phishing threats being exposed to the employees. PHISH360° accelerates program advancement by capturing actual insights across all digital exposures, well beyond just email click-actions. This allows security teams to identify high-risk users and target them with more focused training.
Behavioral Change Stage
At this stage, security awareness programs become more systematic and integrated into the organization’s operations. Security awareness has cross-team alignment with managing human risk and situational response. The focus shifts from awareness alone to actual behavior change. Metrics become more detailed, and security is viewed as a shared responsibility across all levels of the organization.
Image 1: PHISH360 makes security awareness training increasingly more successful by helping employees recognize compromised URLs.
How PHISH360° Fits the Behavioral Change Stage:
- Personalized Metrics and Training: The shift from awareness to behavior change is crucial, accelerated by the capacity to differentiate training by organizational role and types of phishing threat exposure. PHISH360° helps organizations deliver relevant content for increased training impact and track not only who participates in training exercises, but engages with actual high-risk phishing threats. These behavioral metrics can be used to reward employees who exhibit good security practices and offer targeted training to those who need improvement.
- Advanced Customization: At this stage, organizations can tailor PHISH360° to the specific needs of different teams or departments. The platform allows for more detailed configuration, ensuring that training campaigns and phishing simulations are relevant to the specific risks faced by various groups within the organization. Content translations can be automated for global distribution. Custom reporting to increase executive alignment with tracking metrics and behavioral performance better positions the security goals with executive mission and mandates.
- Adaptable Content Portfolio: As your security awareness program matures, you will require a broader portfolio of content to align with the educational journey and with building an increased participation of security awareness by all employees. Mixing short form and long form video, a refresh of content styles and adaptable translations will deliver a positive experience for all levels of employee participation.
Integrated Threat Intelligence Controls: Security awareness training teams are better aligned with security analyst and operations teams with increased controls on blocking actual phishing threats. With visibility into actual malicious link exposure, security teams are less burdened by the false positives created by “report fishing” workflows via training simulations.
Culture Change Stage
Program sustainability and genuine culture change occurs when organizations have refined their security awareness programs to the point where they can directly measure the effectiveness of their training in reducing risk. Actual risk, not just a simulation of risk as is common with most phishing training platforms. Data is used to drive decisions, and security awareness is tied to specific, measurable outcomes such as reduced incident rates and improved employee behaviors.
How PHISH360° Fits into the Long-Term Sustainment & Culture Change Stage:
- Risk Reduction Correlation: At this stage, organizations aim to link awareness training directly with risk reduction. PHISH360°’s data-driven insights can be used to correlate employee behavior changes (e.g., fewer clicks on phishing emails) with fewer security incidents and lower false positives, demonstrating the ROI of security awareness efforts.
- Incident Response Integration: When incidents are investigated, there is a need to gain rapid context to who, where, when and what type of potential threat had exposed an employee with the phishing attack. Security operations also need to rapidly contain the breadth of exposure, isolating all paths of potential exposure by identifying who else may have activated a malicious link. Isolation from external threats as well as malicious link exposure with lateral movements. PHISH360°’s reporting delivers immediate insight on all click-behaviors (not just limited to email) to accelerate rapid incident response times.
- Deeper Employee Engagement: The behavioral shift from awareness to changing employees attitudes and perceptions of their role in security will alter their desire to protect more than their corporate assets. With a strong remote workforce culture, PHISH360° supports additional licensing that allows multiple device protection to empower phishing protection beyond a single device login.
Customizable Dashboards: Security teams can use PHISH360°’s customizable dashboards to track KPIs and performance metrics across various teams, regions, and departments. This allows organizations to evolve and adapt to changing executive reporting requirements, compliance and audit adjustments that secure teams are faced with year over year.
Metrics Framework Stage
When security awareness is fully integrated into the organization’s culture, employee security awareness becomes a core part of the organization’s ethos. Continuous improvement is prioritized, with ongoing feedback loops that enhance the program over time.
How PHISH360° Fits the final Metrics Framework Stage:
- Continuous Learning and Adaptation: PHISH360° supports a culture of continuous learning by offering a variety continuous refresh of new training modules and content formats that keep employees engaged.
- Cross-Functional Integration: Security awareness is woven into all aspects of the organization. PHISH360° helps support cross-functional initiatives by providing tools that can integrate with other business processes such as HR onboarding, performance reviews, and incident response protocols.
- Benchmarking and Trend Analysis: PHISH360° allows organizations to benchmark their security awareness program against industry standards or historical data. Success metrics can be applied and tracked against real world phishing exposure, not how prone employees may be to a simulation.
Adaptation to New Threats: As phishing techniques continue to evolve, PHISH360° ensures that employees are prepared for new attack vectors by continuously updating its training materials and phishing simulations with the latest real-world threats.
Conclusion
PhishCloud’s PHISH360° is a powerful tool that adapts seamlessly to organizations at every stage of the SANS Security Awareness Maturity Model. Whether an organization wishes to jumpstart their program with limited resources or increase operational efficiency by better alignment with the security team, PHISH360° offers the tools and outstanding professional services support to increase your enterprise security posture.
In today’s market, there’s only one platform that offers the industry’s best training combined with the most comprehensive phishing protection technology available: PhishCloud PHISH360°!
