New security awareness training and simulated phishing testing campaigns have been added to KnowBe4’s Kevin Mitnick Security Awareness Training 2015 platform.
KnowBe4 provides a popular integrated platform used to make sure employees understand the mechanisms of spam, phishing, spear-phishing, malware and social engineering, and are then able to apply this knowledge in their day-to-day job.
The company said in an announcement that, “More than ever, employees are the weak link in network security. Kevin Mitnick Security Awareness Training is a high quality, interactive training program that uses case-studies, live demonstration videos and short tests, combined with frequent year-round simulated phishing attacks.”
KnowBe4 said, “Case studies end with a short multiple choice test, and a phishing quiz is presented at the end of the training. Customers who have tried out the new Training Campaigns were all excited with the new functionality and the extensive reporting that comes with it."
“I’m very happy with the new reporting features. They are a big improvement,” Homeland Security Today was told by Maarten van Breemen, BAS Director, Europe IT Business Relationship Management.
“The Training Campaigns feature is by far the most requested by our customers,” said KnowBe4 CEO Stu Sjouwerman,who wrote, Corporate Cybersecurity Issues Aren’t Impossible to Solve, in the March 2014 Homeland Security Today. “When it comes to rolling out training for your users, this feature does the heavy lifting for you, saving time and effort associated with setup and chasing down users who need to finish their training for compliance purposes.”
“Being the most popular platform for security awareness training program and simulated phishing, gives us a distinct advantage as we work closely with our customers to gain feedback on the improvements they want and need,” Sjouwerman explained, noting, “We understand our community of more than 1,500 customers need a more automated, yet effective security awareness training process, and we are delivering.”
KnowBe4 said its “new training campaigns feature will allow organizations to better control their training environment. KnowBe4 training campaigns provides learning management system functionality which gives IT an easy way to manage user training while providing sophisticated reporting.”
”The training campaigns,” the company said, will “allow an organization to create ongoing or deadline-based training campaigns for their employees. These campaigns can contain any or all of the courses and limit course availability by group. Training campaigns can be set up to automatically send e-mail invitations and signup links to users, prompting them (at various intervals) to complete training by a specified time-frame. This functionality also allows administrators to train a group of users and pass them all at once.”
Key features of the training campaigns provide the ability to:
- Create ongoing (permanent) training campaigns for an organization;
- Set up campaigns with a specified deadline for training completion;
- Limit course availability for various groups of users;
- Automatically send enrollment emails to any number of users, inviting them to take the training;
- Automatically send follow up emails to nudge users who have yet to complete the training;
- Administrators can pass multiple users at once for group training environments;
- Auto-enroll new users who are added to a group or company (invite via email); and
- Customizable email notification templates for enrollments and follow-up
“The training campaign dashboard also lets users monitor a campaign’s status, completion percentage and every individual’s progress at a glance,” KnowBe4 said. “Additionally, campaigns can be extended past their initial deadline, and the amount of active campaigns can be limitless.
