Evaluate Security Awareness Program
Organizations always put their technical efforts in case of any unwanted incident occurrence. Not all these efforts seem successful if the security culture of the organizations is not up to the mark.
In the absence of strong security cultures, organizations cannot take advantage of security assessments or penetration testing.
A successful security awareness program can provide help to build a robust security environment in the organization. Security awareness practitioners have to mull over a successful security awareness program.
The object of the Security Awareness Program:
The security awareness program helps organization staff to identify issues related to information security.
It also helps to understand them to work within current regulatory requirements that could lessen the cyber risks in the organization. With this program, an organization can build a secure internal system to prevent data breaches inside the infrastructure.
The program includes employee awareness and the proper training program to deal with policy, procedure, and tools.
Basic Essentials of a Program:
The program should have a few key essentials that make it successful and effective, which are as follows:
- The message of the program must reach the end-user to make him believe that information security is an integral part of the business process.
- Individuals engaged in the program should be identified and they should know the responsibility of the implementation of the program.
- The program should have the ability to decide the sensitivity of the information, the urgency of application, business process, and system.
- A security awareness program should cover the fundamentals of security.
- Senior management should support while drafting a security awareness program.
Measuring Security Awareness Program:
The security awareness program is a dynamic process, which should be measured by certain aspects. These efforts will increase the strength of security in an organization.
Organizations that have a high level of security effectiveness can better identify data breaches, protect sensitive information, restrict data storage access, and comply with security frameworks.
Checking False Positive Reporting Rate (FPPR):
The first thing in measuring security awareness programs is FPPR. If the FPRR (False Positive Reporting Rate) is high, it means there is a requirement for better training from the initial level analysis.
It may happen that bottom-level analysis has a lack of understanding and visibility regarding the incident. Therefore, they escalate the problem with the third-level analysis team.
The team should verify that the data is about real threats as the false-positive reports increase the burden on top-level management and incident handlers that creating a waste of valuable resources.
Fix Software Vulnerability:
Organizations should have the specific time to solve software vulnerabilities. Many organizations do not reveal the fact of internal vulnerabilities, which opens the door for flaws in software and applications.
In fact, such vulnerabilities must be fixed during the application development process. To measure the static analysis, the number of flaws fixed against the reported flaws should be considered.
Patch Response Time:
Patch Response Time or Patch latency plays a vital role in eliminating risks associated with the organization and its devices. When there are innumerable devices, patching every device seems a daunting task.
During patching software or applications, there should be a reporting about the new vulnerabilities, patched vulnerabilities, and the remained or unpatched vulnerabilities.
Patch latency also indicates the effectiveness of a security awareness program. It shows the ratio of the total number of secured devices against reduced risk factors inside the device.
Incident Response:
Many organizations faced incidents in the past; therefore, it is necessary to track the number of incidents that occurred. The solved incident response cases against pending incident response cases should be considered.
This tracking of incidents helps Chief Information Security Officer to recognize the way incidents are detected and dealt.
It shows that incidents are identified along with root analysis and rectification. The security team should consider the rate of incident handling, which helps them to find the gap between the visibility of incidents and the incidents handled.
Data Analytical Time:
The collected data and the time is taken for data analysis should be minimal otherwise, it can cause an overload of information. A lower analytical time helps the security team to identify and resolve the breach. As a result, It will ensure an improvement in the overall security standard of the organization.
Employee Behavior:
It is wise to track the effectiveness of a training session by giving a phishing or social engineering task to trainees. After completion of the task, always reward trainees by announcing the results. Observe the failure of trainees and help them with proper guidance that will educate them to learn from their errors.
Conclusion:
Security awareness program helps organizations to build their reputation and customer loyalty. As a core part of an information security program, the above measures should be mulled over in organizations to improve and enhance security awareness activities.
The program should not only educate customers about information security issues, but it should also offer a chance to security managers to evaluate their efforts.
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