A German e-recruiting business, Stepstone, has used an email security product. Its employees were receiving ten spear phishing emails a month. The job portal nearly fell victim to an impersonation attack, whereby criminals pretend to be employees, and aim to gain access to data. StepStone receives around ten million emails a month and once 70 to 75 per cent of these were infected and dangerous; and reaching employees. Mimecast provided a technical solution in web security, and besides provided bespoke training for staff.
Serge Groven, Corporate IT Manager at StepStone, described the training videos as short (three to five minutes), entertaining and each conveying a clear safety message, that sticks. “The videos are reminiscent of a good TV entertainment show with recognisable characters. We actually experience that our employees ask when the next ‘episode’ will appear. Today we experience far fewer email threats. Just a month after implementing the new security solution, we saw an enormous decrease in spear phishing emails, and we are still noticing that today.”
The neuroscientist Dr Daniel Glaser, said: “Why would you use humour in corporate training around cyber-security? The way we learn and recall information suggests this is a good idea. Our brains are always on the lookout for the unexpected – there is a particular signature in the brain for ‘oddball’ stimuli – and comedy elements in the presentation of email security protocols immediately grab our attention.”
Glaser continued: “Making things funny produces a richer set of associations when you’re forming new memories. The memories we form are holistic and can include the emotion (and smells and sounds) that were present when we first encountered the content. So if humour is intrinsic to the security message, it gets rolled into a more distinctive package that makes it more likely that you’ll successfully retrieve it when you need to. There’s nothing funny about a ransomware attack – but this approach to training can help to keep a smile on your face.”
More in the November print edition of Professional Security magazine on the regular ‘Spending the Budget’ pages. Visit https://www.mimecast.com/customer-success/customer-stories/.
