Employee Focused Approach, Most Effective Way To Counter Cyber Threats

The human element remains to be the biggest factor causing data breaches, says Verizon’s Data Breach Report 2022 adding that %82 of the data breaches in last year occurred after a human error. For sure, phishing has been a powerful weapon to deceive in the hands of cyber criminals. Therefore, security awareness training is obviously the most effective precaution to take for the aim of defending networks and data.

In a webinar hosted by two CEO’s, Sinisa Viojtek, CEO and Co-founder of Nestec, and Ozan Uçar, CEO and Co-founder of Keepnet Labs, the importance of employee focused approach in cyber security is underlined and they state the best way to challenge with the security threats is to strengthen the weakest link in the chain, the human.

‘Employees should be able to recognize and report threats’

Vioitek started off the webinar by discussing why employee education is important. From a CEO perspective, employees are the first line of defense and therefore should be properly trained and educated in order to create a secure environment. A layered security approach should also be implemented where different security layers exist to protect the users. Focus should also be on end-point devices and users should be constantly informed of the current threats. “Employees are considered the weakest link when it comes to matters of cyber-attack.” said he. Most of the time they are the ones most likely to cause a security breach. Because of this, focus should be on employees. With proper education and training, employees should be able to recognize and report threats.

Vioitek continued by giving some information about Keepnet Labs. He stated that there are four phases of email-based attacks; planning, attack, compromise and data loss. The goal of Keepnet Labs is to protect businesses through the life cycle of email-based attacks, he said. Keepnet offers protection against all attack phases. It has over 1200 customers in 25 countries with more than 1 million active licenses and 3 patent pending technologies.

‘Keepnet provides proactive cyber defense against malicious emails’

Keepnet CEO who was next in line to speak in the webinar stated the problem that most of the email-based attacks start when a malicious email is sent. Even though existing cyber security technologies pledge to prevent these attacks, they normally fail to do so. Recipients of these emails fall victim to the phishing attacks and social engineering. The victim organizations have experienced deep financial loss along with reputational damages and decrease in customer trust.

Keepnet supports the organizations before, during and after the attack

The proper solution for Keepnet’s CEO is to be more efficient in detecting the malicious emails and to have tightened measures that can prevent data loss. He highlighted that his company, Keepnet, provides the solution by proactively challenging the defense layers and users, training and tracking users for phishing awareness and empowering the SOC for quick response.

According to Uçar, Keepnet helps companies before, during and after email-based attacks by ensuring that the people, technologies, and processes are ready. It uses phishing and email threat simulators, threat intelligence and awareness educators to single out a malicious email. In the event of an attack, it uses an incident responder to neutralize the threat. In case of data loss after the attack, it cleans the inbox and shares the threat with other community members to create awareness.

Keepnet supports the organizations before, during and after the attack

Uçar highlighted some of the benefits that come with using Keepnet. First, there is an increase in efficiency. This is because the ROI of the security stack is increased from 25% to 90%, teams are empowered and functions are aligned. The other benefit is it leads to cost reduction. Since threats are eliminated efficiently, the number of email threats related service desk tickets reduces. It reduces the need for manpower required for incident response. Suspicious email analysis time is also reduced from 2 hours to 1 minute. The last benefit that he discussed is that it leads to lowered risk. The risk of data loss and breach through malicious emails is reduced over %90.

The last thing that Uçar talked about is Keepnet licensing. The licensing is divided into 4 modules; defender, awareness, SOC and Enterprise. The defender module includes threat intelligence and email threat simulator. The awareness module includes a phishing simulator and awareness educator. The SOC module includes incident responder and threat sharing. The enterprise module has all features included.