Cyber Security Awareness Month

Cyber Security Awareness Month takes place every October and highlights the importance of raising cyber security awareness.

With a fifth of companies lacking cyber security training, there has never been a more crucial time to leverage Cyber Security Awareness Month to kick off cyber security mindsets across your team!

Continue reading to discover how to improve cyber security awareness and why training and upskilling your workforce should be vital to building cyber security awareness.

Offensive VS Defensive Security

Offensive and defensive security are crucial pillars of organisational security.

Developing an offensive security mindset across your organisation helps to strengthen your cyber security standing by creating better defence plans. Testing defence controls in an offensive manner from the mindset of a hacker creates a better understanding of how hackers would approach their systems and how preventative measures can be taken.

TryHackMe’s Jr Penetration Testester Pathway covers the core technical and practical skills necessary to perform offensive security assessments, while the new Red Team Pathway walks you through more advanced topics in offensive security, including how to execute adversary attack emulations.

In contrast, defensive security ensures intrusions are not only prevented but also detected and responded to accordingly if they do occur. Defensive security focuses on reactive measures, aiming to safeguard the organisation in all situations. Frequent reactive measures include patching software, finding and fixing system vulnerabilities, and creating and implementing a combination of security practices.

Our Cyber Defence Pathway teaches you the fundamental components of detecting and responding to threats, including threat and vulnerability management, security operations, incident response and forensics, malware analysis and reverse engineering.

Creating Security Champions

Building a cyber culture in your workforce is vital for promoting cyber security awareness for employees and should be integrated to tackle common threats, including:

• Ransomware
• Malware
• Phishing
• Unpatched systems
• Human error

In creating a strong cyber culture, security champions can advance and amplify awareness of cyber security and their expertise throughout the organisation and are vital in instilling the message across teams. Cyber security champions play essential roles in promoting cyber security measures and bridging gaps in cyber awareness.

Employees play an essential role in maintaining security, while 43% are "very" or "pretty" confident they have made a mistake at work with security repercussions. Employees should not only have awareness of cyber security but also feel empowered to learn and work within security practices.

Training Teams

Ongoing cyber security awareness training and upskilling are critical to a cyber culture in the workplace and are invaluable in arming teams with the knowledge and skills to prevent threats and reduce negative implications.

For cyber security teams, continuous upskilling can help to stay on top of new threats and advances to evolve with the fluidity of the industry. The best way for cyber security teams to defend against attacks is to adopt a proactive approach with realistic simulations and continuous training and upskilling.

For non-technical teams, education and awareness are vital in eliminating weaknesses, significantly reducing the likelihood of a breach from occurring. Providing cyber security training for your non-technical team will arm them with the knowledge and skills to know what to look out for and the common threats they are likely to face.

Having better cyber security awareness can, in many cases, prevent these threats from taking place.

TryHackMe Training

Give your team structured learning paths and practical self-paced training to upskill in real-world environments with guided, objective-based tasks and challenges. Use TryHackMe's pre-built courses, or make your own that align with your team's requirements.

We teach cyber security in practice - where you can hack and defend virtual machines in a real-world environment to get realistic, transferable skills in entirely safe surroundings.

In addition to our training rooms, our Capture The Flags is a competitive challenge whereby users are expected to “capture flags” to increase their score. Users can also try out King of the Hill (KOTH), a competitive hacking game for teams to compromise a machine and patch its vulnerabilities to stop other players from gaining access. Both challenges are a great way to promote competitive spirit and spur learning.

Our training pathways explore high-level offensive and defensive content and allow cyber security teams to stay on top of new threats and advances in the industry. This keeps the company safe and structures training in an easily-trackable, efficient, and engaging way.