Secure Practice provides interactive employee training against cyberattacks

In the EU, more than 10 terabytes of data are stolen monthly in cyberattacks. The compound effect of these data breaches is that phishing and email scams become more effective, and ransomware attacks more frequent and much more extortionate.

Because humans are a highly vulnerable part of the security landscape, they often get all the blame – when in reality, people represent our biggest potential for improving cyber resilience.

“How would you react if you woke up to a cyberattack in the company where you work?” asks Gjære. “The problem is that most people don’t know what to do because they have not received proper training,” he adds.

Read more: How to succeed with security behaviour change

Secure Practice provides data-driven tools to cultivate security among colleagues in a workplace. Supported by scalable cloud services, the company is putting special focus on the role of employees in cybersecurity. Normally seen as the weak link, employees become a company’s first line of defence through team-based, interactive simulation training.

“At Secure Practice, we want to reduce cyber risk by inviting people into an interactive experience where they share, collaborate and get challenged by an actual incident. With the interactive features people also feel the tension rising and see how these emotional aspects can affect their emergency preparedness,” explains Gjære.

“As they say in the US Marine Corps: Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. Together we practice how you should react when time is short, information is scarce, and the risk is high,” he adds.

Secure Practice’s approach is so innovative that it recently received EUR 2.5 million in funding from the EU’s Digital Europe Programme, which promotes the twin objectives of a green transition and digital transformation while strengthening Europe’s resilience and digital sovereignty.

As a first step, Secure Practice is offering free interactive trainings to 1 000 Norwegian businesses, creating self-engagement and self-efficacy in cybersecurity. “We are trying to create a sense of mastery among employees. Security depends on people and human-centred designs, not just technology,” says Gjære.

Read more: Always prepared with interactive preparedness exercises

After completion of the Norwegian pilot initiative in 2024, the company’s cyber preparedness exercise sessions will be offered in other European countries. The Norwegian training is an initiative supported by several large organisations, including Digital Norway, DNB (Norway’s largest bank), DNV (certification, business assurance and R&D), NHO (Norway’s largest employer organisation) and Telenor (Norway’s largest telecom operator).

Secure Practice is now searching for local partners in EU countries to expand its initiative.

The annual cost of cybercrime to the global economy is estimated to have reached EUR 5.5 trillion. On the flip side, the value of the EU cybersecurity market is estimated at more than EUR 130 billion, and it is growing at a rate of 17 per cent each year.

With its plan for European expansion, Secure Practice is well positioned to address these staggering figures. “We anticipate helping at least 1 million people in Europe with cybersecurity during the next couple of years” states Gjære.

“We are challenging the perception of people as the weakest link in cybersecurity and turning security into something positive for everyone,” he concludes.