The Top 10 Security Awareness Training Solutions For Business

Proofpoint’s training materials are popular with users. They offer a growing library of training content, including modules, videos, posters images and articles- designed to promote better security behaviours and to help users to spot attacks like phishing and signs of account compromise. Proofpoint’s training materials are available in 35 languages, with each module taking a user around 15 minutes to complete. Training materials are available on demand, and are customizable for your users.

Alongside training materials, Proofpoint offers threat simulation to test how effectively your users can spot malicious emails and help you to target awareness training to the right people within your organization. Proofpoint provides over 700 different phishing templates to test multiple types of malicious emails, including those with malicious attachments, embedded links and requests for personal data. Proofpoint Security Awareness Training is now available as part of Proofpoint Essentials, an email security package which includes Proofpoint’s leading email gateway, encryption, and security awareness training, making it a strong solution for organizations looking for awareness training alongside email security.

You can read our full review of Proofpoint Security Awareness Training here.

KnowBe4 is one of the fastest growing security awareness training organizations, dominating the market in terms of customer growth. They offer a range of free tools, which help organizations to test their employee’s security awareness, which has helped their platform to reach a wide audience comprising of both small businesses and some larger enterprise customers. Their training content is award winning, with over 1000 different training materials on offer, comprising of interactive modules, videos, games, posters and newsletters.

KnowBe4 also offer reporting and insights to track the effectiveness of your security awareness training campaigns. They offer a range of reports, with the option to generate training reports for specific users or specific groups, to help organizations ensure that their most at-risk users are engaging with awareness training materials and simulated phishing campaigns. The KnowBe4 platform is comprehensive, and a good option for most organizations looking to implement a security awareness training platform.

You can read Expert Insights’ complete review of KnowBe4 here.

PsySec’s training content is made up of two programs. PsySec Essentials, delivered annually, covers broad topics that all employees should have a solid understanding of, including phishing, password security and secure remote working. PsySec Deep Dives, delivered monthly, take complex topics and make them more accessible through real-life scenarios and entertaining narratives. Employees receive a monthly single-video course that delves into a single security topic in depth and in an immersive way.

PsySec also enables employers to test their employees’ learning with real-life, customizable phishing simulations. If employees respond incorrectly to the simulation, they’re redirected to a landing page that informs them of their error and gives them tips on how they should respond in the future. PsySec generates reports of simulation results, helping admins to identify employees that require further training, and enabling them to log their organization’s improvement in awareness over time. These API reports integrate easily with existing SOCs and dashboards.

PsySec’s powerful automation when it comes to simulation and reporting make it very user-friendly. Designed to meet CMMC and NIST compliance standards, it ticks all the boxes that any awareness training platform should, but also goes a step further by creating materials that are genuinely engaging for its users. Because of this, we recommend Hook Security’s PsySec as a strong platform for both SMBs and enterprises who want to transform their employees into cyber heroes.

Inspired eLearning’s training materials are split into three plans, Select, Preferred and Elite, allowing organizations to choose the level of training materials relevant to their users and organization. Training materials are high quality and consist of multiple content modules. Admins report that the service is easy to set up and deploy, with high quality analytics on offer. Training materials are available online and offline, and are also available on a mobile app.

This platform offers a strong phishing simulation component. Simulation is available for all types of social engineering attacks, including email phishing, voice phishing, SMS phishing and simulated USB attacks. This helps to ensure your most at risk employees know what different types of social engineering attacks look like, and how to report them. Inspired eLearning provides training content in more than 40 languages.

You can read our full review of PhishProof here. 

IRONSCALES phishing simulation provides realistic simulated phishing emails, modelled off the thousands of real-world examples of phishing that IRONSCALES analyze every day. The library of pre-built phishing templates can be fully customized and white-labelled by IT admins, and simulated phishing attacks can be targeted at departments, groups, or individual users based on their risk assessment score. IRONSCALES also provides a range of reports which allow admins to track how well users are performing and direct further training where needed. If users click on simulated phishing emails, they are taken to a customizable landing page, which can recommend steps to take to avoid being phished in future.

IRONSCALES also installs a ‘Report Phish’ button within the users’ email client, allowing them to report suspicious emails in real time. IRONSCALES automatically analyzes these reported emails, remediating against threats if they are detected. Any threats reported by users will automatically be flagged with a warning label across the entire IRONSCALES platform where the same suspicious email is delivered. These warning labels provide an extra level of training to users, warning them what suspicious emails can look like in their usual email environment. IRONSCALES also provides security awareness content delivered by Ninjio; this is purchased as an additional extra module. IRONACALES is also easy to deploy, installing into Microsoft 365 via API integration and Azure Active Directory. IRONSCALES Threat Assessment is a strong security awareness training solution which we would recommend to organizations looking for a single unified solution with powerful protection against phishing attacks alongside user training.

Infosec IQ offers over 700 different training courses, which include interactive training modules, microlearning videos, assessments, posters, infographics, campaign kits and more. Their content library is extensive, able to tailor for a range of audiences and different levels of security knowledge throughout the organization.  InfoSec also allow you to run simulated phishing attacks, with a library of phishing templates and customizable resources to help test your employees.

InfoSec allows you to measure your organizations compliance with awareness training and the overall ‘phish rate’ with automated campaign reports and assessments to help you target training in departments where security breaches may occur. InfoSec is one of the fastest growing security awareness training vendors, offering a growing number of security courses, aimed at both enterprises and small and midsized organizations.

Cofense offers a range of pre-prepared phishing scenarios – which include landing pages and malicious attachments, that can be customized. Cofense streamlines set up, allowing you to set dates throughout the year for campaigns to run. They also use machine learning to recommend phishing scenarios, based on your industry and the most common attacks they are seeing. Their Responsive Delivery feature means that users will only receive simulated phishing emails when they are most active in their mailbox.

Alongside PhishMe, Cofense offers a full security awareness platform: Cofense Security Awareness LMS. Cofense offers a range of training materials delivered in short modules, with admin visibility over which employees are engaging with learning materials. Cofense are also known for their threat detection platform: ‘Cofense Triage and Cofense Reporter.’ Triage implements a ‘Report Phish’ button directly into users’ email inboxes, allowing them to report any suspicious emails to IT admins. Triage helps admins to manage these email reports, performing automated email analysis. This helps IT teams to better detect phishing emails inside their email envrionment.

Training materials consist of animated modules covering a range of cybersecurity topics and issues. Training materials are written by cybersecurity experts and consist of animations, host-led animations and live action shorts. Many of the materials include situational quizzes, and there are even games available which help to teach users about security topics in an interactive way, which is argued to help engage people more with training materials.

SANS’ phishing simulation campaigns allow your IT admins to target specific groups in the organization with customized phishing emails. They offer a range of real-world phishing templates, and offer a range of reports to track how well people are performing in the simulated tests. This solution is a good option for organizations looking for comprehensive security awareness training for technical users, with a focus on video training materials.

Webroot Security Awareness Training comprises bitesize, easy-to-consume training materials that encourage an interactive learning experience to increase user engagement. Training is set on a continuous basis, and Webroot update their content library regularly (at least once a month) to ensure that employees are prepared to face even the most current methods of attack. Webroot also enables organizations to test their employees’ learning via simulated phishing campaigns. The built-in template editor allows admins to customize training content to the specific threats their employees are facing. From the management console, admins can keep track of employee participation, schedule campaigns, and configure automatic reminders for them to complete their training. Admins can also view activity reports that enable them to measure user progress and ROI.

Webroot has a strong focus on ease of set-up – admins can easily integrate the training solution with Azure Active Directory to automatically set and maintain relevant training for all employees, including auto-enrollment for new hires that speeds up and simplifies the onboarding process. The user-friendly deployment and maintenance, combined with Webroot’s campaign management wizard and simulation email templates, make Webroot Security Awareness Training a particularly strong solution for SMBs looking for an efficient, effective way to offer their employees cybersecurity training.

Barracuda offers hundreds of simulation templates, which includes landing pages, risk assessment surveys and training content. New simulation and training content are added daily, reflecting recent threats identified by Barracuda’s threat detection platform. Barracuda also offers a built in ‘report phish’ button, which allows users to report suspicious emails to IT admins. Their training materials are regularly updated to ensure that materials stay relevant, with a wide range of different training materials available.

Barracuda provides important insights into which employees represent a potential risk of causing a data breach and so require more security training.  They provide huge amounts of data, quantifying your users risk by impact and likelihood scores, helping you do deliver awareness training to the employees and teams that need it most. Barracuda offer gamified awareness training, with leader boards and user levelling systems that encourage users to spot and report threats.