FEATURE: CYBERSECURITY
called email fraud defence, which protects
companies as well.
One of the biggest areas of growth for our
company is security awareness training.
The biggest thing we can help companies
with is educating their employees first. If
we can educate them on avoiding clicking
on certain things, they’re not going to get
into difficulties in the first place. Security
awareness training is online training which
our customers use in many different ways
but one of the key elements of it is called
phishing simulation – our customers can
actually do an internal phish simulation
inside the organisation and when employees
click on things they shouldn’t have, it is
done in a safe environment. This allows for
bespoke internal trainings.
Can the approach to
educating users on what
to avoid be improved?
We must remember that for most employees
in a company, understanding cybersecurity is
not their core competency. In fact, it’s so far
removed from their core competency that
they’re really not to blame. The progressive
companies are those that are looking at
security awareness training to educate their
customers and be proactive about it.
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So, what most of our customers do is
utilse our solutions upfront, which is part
of the induction process, so when a new
employee joins the company they go
through a series of training sessions to
hopefully stop them from inadvertently
doing things they shouldn’t.
However, it’s not enough to just do the
training when somebody first joins because
three years down the line they will have
forgotten what they did in those first few
weeks. This is where the second element of
the security awareness training solutions we
offer comes into play. Our customers can
use our solutions to carry out an internal
phishing simulation attack and that way
it’s in a safe environment, allowing the
company to understand which employees
know which attachments to avoid and who
needs extra help.
So instead of coming down really hard on
people who’ve had induction training but
haven’t had professional training since,
it’s a really effective way to decipher
between those who are in need of further
cybersecurity training. So, we say make it
part of the induction process but then have
an ongoing programme where you can
identify people that need to develop their
cybersecurity awareness.
Keith Bird, Vice President of Northern
Europe, Middle East & Africa, Proofpoint
How would you describe the
current cybersecurity landscape
in Europe?
If you look at all of the solutions we
provide, they’re addressing the biggest
vulnerabilities which is currently email as
well as social media. Everyone is using social
media, which is why we have solutions to
protect companies but also their employees
while they’re active on social media sites.
Another example of this is people using
their own email systems at work such
as Hotmail. So, we have a system called
Proofpoint Browser Isolation and this gives
employees the chance to use their own
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