How to Introduce Security Champions to Strengthen Your Company’s Cyber Culture

A study reveals that 70% of small-medium-sized businesses admit they are unprepared to deal with a cyber attack, while only 57% of large businesses have a formal cyber security strategy in place.

To stay on top of risks, fostering an environment where cyber security becomes a standard practice is paramount. Most importantly, employees should feel empowered and equipped with the knowledge and skills to remain cyber secure, with practices that integrate seamlessly with their work.

Whilst many businesses have security measures in place, cyber security protection can only go as far as the workforce utilising the system. Making cyber security considerations is (and should be) an essential factor in an employee’s job scope to develop resilience against cyber threats.

In creating a strong cyber culture, security champions can help advance and embed security awareness and expertise. As employees with a passion for cyber security, security champions help to amplify the message across teams and are vital in promoting cyber security measures.

Cyber Security Culture in Organisations

The concept of a cyber security culture refers to the knowledge, attitudes, norms and values with respect to cyber security in the workplace. Cyber culture can and should be integrated as part of the wider organisational culture to tackle common threats, including:

• Ransomware
• Malware
• Phishing
• Unpatched systems

These cyber threats are generally caused by human error, with most cyber attacks resulting from employee negligence and lack of awareness. Some recurrent trends include:

• Reused passwords across personal and business computers and applications
• Ignoring a certificate expiration notice
• Postponing software updates
• Opening and clicking unsafe email links

Most employees believe the responsibility of cyber security does not fall on everyone, but instead, a specific team - with 30% of employees believing they do not play an essential role in maintaining the company’s cyber security. In contrast, cyber security should be a priority for an entire workforce.

Employees and all parties must understand the importance of building a cyber culture in your workforce, with all organisation members on board for a cyber culture to work successfully. Engagement, communication and participation are vital when introducing a cyber security culture framework.

Creating a security champion makes it possible to nurture and encourage cyber security awareness while addressing cyber vulnerabilities before they become widespread and problematic.

Creating Security Champions

Developing a security champion program can be a significant element of your cyber security training plan.

Where part of the team lacks the knowledge and skills, having a cyber security champion to instil the message across the workforce is essential in sustaining a cyber culture. This also helps set security standards for other team members and improve the overall security level in the business.

Security champions can compensate for lack of security skills among existing teams, bridging the gap between security and development teams and allowing you to scale up cyber awareness.

With any technical or complex aspects of cyber security that are challenging for a broader team to digest, a security champion can take their co-workers through this, in a clear, concise manner.

How to Build a Security Champions Program

Prior planning is key to launching and maintaining a successful cyber security champions program. Before rolling out, it’s vital that all senior leaders are on board, understand the value of, and are actively promoting the security champion program.

When creating a security champion role, the ideal candidate must be a good communicator and dedicated to actively engaging in training and awareness. You can choose to open up the possibility to join the program across each team, with additional incentives to promote awareness and allow for better engagement.

Security champion training should remain an ongoing priority to keep up-to-date with the latest practices, methodologies and tooling. TryHackMe can help form a cyber culture within your organisation, with engaging, interactive training helping users stay safe online, designed to open the door to creating security champions within your organisation.

Security Champion Training

TryHackMe upskills and arms teams with knowledge of tools and practices to mitigate cyber attacks, and can be a pillar to building cyber culture.

With a plethora of labs and training for beginners just starting out in cyber security, we also have labs suited to experts in the field. Our training pathways explore high-level offensive and defensive content and allow security champions and security teams to stay on top of new threats and advances in the industry.

Our training modules are perfect for the entirety of your team to build foundations for a cyber culture.