How to Improve Security Training with Human Psychology

Stop sending your leaders to cybersecurity seminars. Pair them with a 24-year-old analyst instead. For years, we’ve relied on a standard playbook to educate our senior leaders. We provide them with high-level metrics and heat maps, discussing risk in abstract terms that are often sanitized for an executive audience. But I’m starting to believe this approach, while well-intentioned, is creating a dangerous blind spot. The messy reality is that the front lines of cyber warfare are not in the boardroom; they are on platforms like Discord, Telegram, and the countless new apps our teams use every day. The threats are not just technical exploits. They are sophisticated, AI-driven social engineering campaigns and psychological tricks that are born out of modern digital culture. This is a culture that many seasoned leaders are, understandably, not a part of. Recently, I was chatting with a junior analyst about their weekend. They casually mentioned how a friend's online account was hijacked through an elaborate scam on a gaming platform. The level of detail they provided was astounding. They explained the specific psychological triggers the attacker used, the speed of the attack, and the social proof that made it so convincing. That informal, two-minute story was a more valuable piece of threat intelligence than many formal reports I've read. This is why I’ve become a passionate advocate for Reverse Mentoring as a core security strategy. Imagine pairing a senior executive with a junior security analyst, not as a one-off meeting, but as a genuine mentorship relationship. The executive gains a real, unfiltered understanding of the modern threat landscape, developing a kind of "threat empathy" that a PowerPoint chart could never convey. For the junior mentor, the experience is transformative. They gain invaluable exposure to executive thinking and learn how to articulate technical risk in terms of business impact. It is the best leadership training we could offer them, demonstrating that their voice and unique perspective are crucial to the organization's success. Ultimately, building a truly resilient culture requires this kind of intellectual humility. It’s about recognizing that in an age of rapid change, wisdom isn't always tied to tenure. The most secure leaders won't be the ones who have all the answers, but the ones who are brave enough to learn from anyone. 🔔 If you found this perspective valuable, follow me for more insights on the intersection of cybersecurity, leadership, and culture. ♻️ Feel free to share this post if you think it could spark a conversation in your network. #Cybersecurity #Leadership #Mentorship #ReverseMentoring #FutureOfWork #CISO #Management #CorporateCulture

Let's talk #securityculture and how it impacts your organization's #cyberresiliency. I love this Forbes take on the simple and relatable depiction of the 'planting, care and feeding' of a security culture and the compounding affects it has on an organizations ability to weather the storm of a cyber related incident. "Just as the immune system helps protect against harmful bacteria and viruses, organizations too need to build immunity to not only defend against external and internal threats, but to train people and build the processes and technologies to respond, recover, learn and emerge stronger from cyberattacks, disruptions, leaks and data breaches." So where do you start? and just as importantly, where do you stop? 🛑 Stop checking the Security Awareness Training box for compliance. Not only are you creating an environment where employees are lacking in engagement, you aren't driving any meaningful impact toward managing risk. 🛑 Stop waiting until October's official Security Awareness month to start. Cue the corny memes and splashy vendor events. While fun and sometimes entertaining, this celebratory month doesn't create a magical shift in the atmosphere that suddenly makes your employees care more about security. 🛑 Stop using FUD, threatening to remove access or even worse - terminating a staff member if they fall for a phishing test. If you do this, you may never recover your reputation with your organization and will likely only increase your risk of insider threat. ✅ Do introduce face to face security training to your staff on day 1 of their employment. Not only are you setting them up for success with understanding the ins and outs of your expectations around security posture, you're creating a safe space and allowing them to put a face with a name. This ensures they not only know who to go to when they need to, but they feel safe in doing so. ✅ Do tailor your security awareness by understanding how and what your business needs to succeed. Take the time to understand how every leader, department and team defines and measures success. By making security awareness personal to the goals and objectives of your business, you will be more successful in obtaining alignment and buy-in. ✅ Do try new things. Be inclusive and recognize that everyone has different learning styles and preferred ways of consuming information. Mix up live trainings with quick videos or monthly newsletters. Drop an "infosec tip of the week" in a slack or teams message or carve out 5 minutes at a quarterly all-hands. ✅ Do make an impact. Help people understand whats in it for them. Building a security culture is not just about benefiting your business. Its about benefiting society. Teach your staff lessons that will not only help them be successful in their time at your organization, but for years to come. https://lnkd.in/gsEaa-Cn

Epic battle, mundane field. We're fighting normalcy. Well, perceived normalcy. It's a bias that goes like this: "Because something has never happened before (to me), it'll never happen." If you've never clicked a link that's rendered a form of doom on your machine - or worse - your network, generalized examples or offhand mention of scammy doom hardly seem relevant. Antimalware software might show it catches something, and that helps desensitize the need for us to be vigilant. Phishing campaign gotcha training and annual refresher CBT alone won't engage long term. Normalcy tells us: Someone (or something) else is handling things that might be a problem. So there's no perceived problem, right? Normalcy also tells us that we're really good at detecting scams. For all the normalcy reasons. Many of the old tricks to catch them - mispellings and poor idioms are gone from the scam communication (and have migrated into AI art instead). We go about our business with normalcy. Executing contracts. Building or designing widgets. Serving customers. Running companies. Training beyond awareness for people who feel they can disregard security (and there are many, many people who do and feel this) requires invoking curiosity. Pointing to a place at - and then later beyond - vigiliance to help recognize the online world isn't like listening to the radio. It's interactive - like the physical world. Driving in Manhattan. If people's emotions at the mention of cybersecurity comprises merely fear + boredom, don't expect results. Aim instead toward understanding + gravity + curiosity. Takes stories, relationship, and trust. Continued examples when that's there. Training to recognize and report what looks off and also apply these skills at home. Scams are getting better - both more effective and more complex. Your people's engagement to fight cybercrime needs improvement to understand and care about this. To combat them. For them and for your organization. This ain't your parents' Internet. But your people need to be trained and deputized. Digital security guards. #cybersecurityawareness #digitalfraud #scams