The Tampa, Fla.-based security awareness training provider KnowBe4 announced it has added a Training Campaigns feature to its Kevin Mitnick Security Awareness Training 2015 platform. The new interactive programs utilize case studies, videos, tests and simulated phishing attacks, the company said.

KnowBe4 said its program helps employees understand the mechanisms of spam, phishing, spear-phishing, malware and social engineering and apply this knowledge to their day-to-day jobs. Case studies end with a short multiple choice test, and a phishing quiz at the end of the training session tests employees on their preparedness.

The new Training Campaigns feature allows organizations 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 email invitations and signup links to users, prompting them at various intervals to complete training by a specified timeframe. This functionality also allows administrators to train a group of users and pass them all at once.

“The Training Campaigns feature is by far the most requested by our customers,” Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4, said. “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. We understand our community of more than 1,500 customers need a more automated, yet effective security awareness training process, and we are delivering.”

Training Campaigns also provides 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; and automatically send enrollment and follow up emails to any number of users, inviting and then nudging them to take and complete the training. The program can also pass multiple users at once in group training environments, auto-enroll new users who are added to a group or company, and provide a point-of-failure training auto-enrollment.

The program's dashboard also lets users monitor a campaign's status, completion percentage and every individual's progress at a glance.

Phishing – and its aftermath – is the most serious concern for five out of six of security-focused decision makers, according to the Black Diamond, Wash.-based firm Osterman Research.

“It is important to invest sufficiently in employee training so that the 'human firewall' can provide the best possible initial line of defense against increasingly sophisticated phishing and other social engineering attacks,” the firm stated.

Risk managers know it is far cheaper to train users than to pay the fines and heavy costs associated with a data breach, which Juniper Networks estimates to account for $2.1 trillion dollars by 2019.

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Roy Urrico

Roy W. Urrico specializes in articles about financial technology and services for Credit Union Times, as well as ghostwriting, copywriting, and case studies. Also: writer/editor of a semi-annual newsletter for Association for Financial Technology since 1997 and history projects funded by the U.S Interior Department, National Park Service and Warren County (N.Y.).