Employees are a company’s first line of defense against cyber crime. Yet, due to poor awareness and a lack of user behaviour monitoring, they fall victim to the trickery of cyber criminals who use sophisticated social engineering techniques to manipulate them into giving away sensitive information. A study by IBM in 2019 showed human error to be the main cause of 95% of cyber security breaches but most of the time, breaches happen through behaviours that employees don’t even think about as risky.

“Education is the missing link in companies’ cyber security strategies. Phishing (impersonation using email) and social engineering are still the weapons of choice for cyber attackers and exposed data on the deep web – including usernames, passwords and privately identifiable information – it is the go-to ammunition. Phishing is not an email or social media problem, it is a human issue.

“By empowering your people to recognise and combat cyber attacks, you can transform them into a powerful first line of defense. Getting everyone across the organisation actively participating in the cyber security strategy is increasingly relevant as more people are working from home,” says Douw Gerber, Business Development Manager at South Africa-based managed IT security services company, Securicom.

uSecure – a new managed service offering from Securicom – transforms user behaviour and reduces the human error risk to cyber attacks. It is designed to simplify and minimise the complexity, cost and resource-heavy administration of security awareness training, offering a highly effective, pain-free solution, supported by a passionate team of infosec specialists.

“uSecure is a user focused cloud-based security awareness platform to help you drive secure employee behaviour. It is an admin-lite, cost effective and intuitive cyber security awareness solution that is managed from an easy-to-use cloud-based portal so no onsite server is required. It can be rolled out to endpoints wherever they might be located. Offered on a subscription basis, it is suitable and affordable for companies of all shapes and sizes,” explains Gerber.

The intelligent training platform identifies users' individual cyber security knowledge gaps and then, crafts personalised programmes that address their unique learning needs. Retention is measured and future training modules are deployed to fill knowledge gaps.

Cyber attacks can also be simulated regularly to help identify your most at-risk users and learn how susceptible they are to ultra-targeted spear-phishing campaigns. You can also monitor vulnerability trends over time.

Using the uBreach functionality within the uSecure platform it can quickly identify exposed employee email accounts and identities that have been publicly disclosed online via third-party data breaches.

uSecure also offers a fully centralised policy management tool that allows IT and HR to create corporate policies, with the ability to fully report on who has received, read and signed these policies. Building cyber awareness training into KPIs ensures that employees keep pace with their training.

uSecure boasts 68 learning modules ranging from compliance to infosec training. Courses range from between 5 to 15 minutes each and covers Annotated images, checklists, cards and video-based material. Amongst the courses included are Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Cloud Security, Working Remotely, Secure Internet and email use.

Securicom is offering a complimentary Employee Risk Assessment (ERA) to companies to get them started. The ERA report identifies employees’ current risk level to internal and external threats through calculating reality-based metrics, including their current susceptibility to targeted phishing attacks as well as identifying data that is stolen or exposed on the dark web.

For more information, go to https://www.e-purifier.com/index.php/usecure/

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