KnowBe4: Helping businesses make smarter security decisions

Founded in 2010, KnowBe4, is the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform, and is used by more than 50,000 organisations around the globe. 

Founded by IT and data security specialist Stu Sjouwerman, KnowBe4 helps organisations address the human element of security by raising awareness about ransomware, CEO fraud and other social engineering tactics through a new-school approach to awareness training on security.

Kevin Mitnick, an internationally recognised cybersecurity specialist and KnowBe4's Chief Hacking Officer, helped design the KnowBe4 training based on his well-documented social engineering tactics. Tens of thousands of organisations rely on KnowBe4 to mobilise their end users as the last line of defence.

Are businesses truly aware of growing cyber risks? 

KnowBe4, recently revealed new research which has found IT decision-makers are complacent about risks to the business from phishing and BEC (Business Email Compromise – also known as CEO Fraud). Surprisingly, fewer than half (45%) of APAC IT decision makers say they are concerned about phishing as a risk to their organisation, while even fewer are concerned about BEC (34%).

When asked to determine whether example emails and SMS were real or fake, only 3% of APAC IT decision-makers were able to correctly identify them all. In addition, more than a quarter (27%) of APAC IT decision-makers use their work phones for personal activity and 25% use their work email address for personal activity.

Jacqueline Jayne, Security Awareness Advocate for APAC at KnowBe4 is concerned: “When those charged with keeping a business secure are unaware of the risks and unable to identify scam emails and SMS messages, their organisations are at significant risk. According to the ACCC, Australians lost a record $323mn to scams in 2021 (up a massive 84 percent from the previous year) and Singapore’s Anti-Scam Centre states Singaporeans lost $201.7mn in the first half of 2021. If those in charge of security are unaware of best practices, then they cannot educate and train employees.

“When employees are using their work email address for personal activities such as online shopping, they are much more likely to fall victim to a phishing attack that uses a hook such as delivery delays to entice the victim to click through. Having a clear separation between work and personal activities makes it much easier to spot when an email is a scam – if you know you never shop online using your work email address, then you know that email from Amazon cannot be real.”

A need to ramp up staff security training 

It was found that only 46% of APAC IT decision-makers were confident that they would know the steps they would need to take following a cyber incident or data breach in their organisation.

Furthermore, just four in ten APAC IT decision-makers believe the employees in their organisations understand the business impact of falling victim to a cyber attack (47%), are confident their employees can identify phishing and BEC emails (42%) and that their employees report all emails they believe to be suspicious (39%).