{"id":31699,"date":"2020-01-29T09:38:48","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T09:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=31699"},"modified":"2020-02-05T19:46:39","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T19:46:39","slug":"telkom-invests-in-cybersecurity-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2020\/01\/29\/telkom-invests-in-cybersecurity-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"Telkom invests in cybersecurity awareness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Redefining a culture of security awareness to ensure corporate and personal security for employees.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telkom South Africa (SA), a leading telecommunications service provider in South Africa, invested in ongoing employee training and development to ensure cybersecurity awareness and compliance. In an evolving cybersecurity landscape that places employees and organisations at risk of fraud, theft and infiltration, this level of training is critical to ensure corporate compliance to privacy\/data protection laws and individual security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telkom had\nundergone a process to review and improve its security solutions and systems as\npart of its commitment to manage cybersecurity as one of its top strategic\nrisks. During the course of this analysis, the company identified employees as\nthe weakest point in its cybersecurity defences and realised the need to\nprovide internal training to ensure that employees became the last line of\ndefence, not the first line of attack.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\nidentified a gap in terms of employee training and awareness around IT and\ncybersecurity, so we entered into the process of selecting the vendor that\ncould best partner with us to provide this service,\u201d says Eseu Choma, Senior\nManager, Information Security Assurance, Telkom SA. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPopcorn\nTraining, a KnowBe4 company, met all our requirements and provided us with a\npackage that was in line with our pockets.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overcoming\nthe challenge of people\u2019s careless online behaviour <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Telkom,\nit was critical that the training offering not only meet budget requirements,\nbut that it be as extensive and engaging as possible. It had to change the\nculture of thinking within the company and provide employees with the tools\nthey needed to remain aware outside of the organisation as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe protect\nour entire network, invest in intelligent systems and solutions, but our\nemployees are always vulnerable targets to cybercriminals. If not trained, they\nare most likely to live a careless lives online,\u201d said Choma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe wanted\nto change our approach from one that just sets goals and box ticking exercises\nto one that changed the culture and engaged with people on what they should do\nfor both the company and themselves. We wanted people to change their internal\nculture as well, so they always led the most secure cyber life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three key\nelements comprised the cybersecurity training process – the learning platform,\nthe efficiency assessment (phishing simulator), and the Phish Alert button. The\nlearning content was developed for the South African audience and included\nfocused and relevant information that didn\u2019t bombard the users. The training\nhad to be short, smart and targeted so that employees could undertake the\ntraining sessions in under 10 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe\ncontent that Popcorn Training a KnowBe4 company provided takes as little as\nthree minutes to complete, getting the entire message across quickly and\nefficiently,\u201d said Choma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis was a\nhuge differentiator for us, as I believe it\u2019s critical that training be short\nin order to be effective and ensure company-wide uptake. We took their content,\nput an internal flavour to it, with KnowBe4\u2019s assistance. We included\nrecordings from management and security teams to set the scene and the\nmotivation for participating in the training overall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KnowBe4\nworked closely with Choma to activate the review portal which allowed them to\nget the overall feedback from users on the effectiveness of the training. The\nportal allowed for Telkom employees to rate and review the content and to\nassess its effectiveness and reach. It was an unmitigated success, achieving a\nrating of 4.7 out of 5 from more than 5,000 employees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe second\nstep was to install a phishing simulator, one that was focused not just on\nimprovement, but on encouraging interactive thinking,\u201d added Choma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe wanted\nour employees to think twice with every click. The first test saw a number of\npeople fail and we plan on running a second test later in the process.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A\nculture of success<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last October,\nas part of the company\u2019s efforts to create company-wide engagement and\nawareness, Telkom ran a \u2018Spot the Phish\u2019 game that was focused on spotting\nmalicious emails. It was a 15 to 20-minute gamified tutorial that was initially\nconcern to Choma \u2013 the length well over the 10-minute maximum he preferred \u2013\nand yet managed to achieve a 4.8 out of 5 rating, 95% positive feedback and\nimpressive employee engagement. One user commented: \u201cI thought I knew it all\nabout phishing attacks but I learned something new today. Thank you very much\nfor the information.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe final\nphase saw us deploy the Phish Alert button which has, since it was deployed in\nApril 2019, seen our employees report more than 8,000 emails,\u201d said Choma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is\nproof that our employees are becoming knowledgeable and capable when it comes\nto cybersecurity. These reports have also led us to uncover some of the gaps in\nour security defences, which we have subsequently reconfigured and addressed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The KnowBe4\nengagement was a complete success for Telkom SA, introducing relevant and\ntargeted training materials to a wide-ranging and diverse employee pool and\nachieving impressive engagement targets. KnowBe4 worked closely with Telkom to\ncustomise the offering and create a training platform that worked within their\nspecific requirements and goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe team\nwas outstanding, always available to help and explain technical requirements\nand ensure the platform is easy to work with,\u201d said Choma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe managed\nto get amazing support from top management and have achieved impressive\nengagement targets. Overall, we have had more than 12,000 employees take part\nin the campaign with an average of 11,000 per module across four different modules.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Redefining a culture of security awareness to ensure corporate and personal security for employees. Telkom South Africa (SA), a leading telecommunications service provider in South Africa, invested in ongoing employee training and development to ensure cybersecurity awareness and compliance. In an evolving cybersecurity landscape that places employees and organisations at risk of fraud, theft and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":31700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,338,399,19,9059,382,262],"tags":[449,388,12450,11076,12449,5473,453,12448],"class_list":["post-31699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-case-studies","category-case-study-newsletter","category-more-news","category-regional-news","category-south-africa","category-telecom","category-used","tag-cybercriminals","tag-cybersecurity","tag-eseu-choma","tag-knowbe4","tag-phish-alert","tag-popcorn-training","tag-south-africa","tag-telkom-south-africa"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31699"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31705,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31699\/revisions\/31705"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}