CybeReady for a leading academic institute

The Challenge. While email as a mode of communication represents a major vulnerability for any organization, academic institutions are especially susceptible. Colleges and universities tend to be open organizations that involve many internal and external constituents, including but not limited to students, faculty staff, administration, researchers, alumni, vendors, contractors, the media and the community at large. When considering all of the audiences involved, and the hundreds of thousands of emails that are sent regularly, the risks from ever-more-deceptive social engineering techniques as well as masked viruses are naturally multiplied. The Solution. Ray (CIO) switched gears, looking for a fully managed service offering rather than handling all of the phishing training operations in-house. In engaging CybeReady, he found a service provider that truly made a difference in employee behavior ‘towards phishing attacks, and did all of the heavy lifting. “Their team has saved me a lot of time and effort from security administration here, and in our second year with them continues to do so,” he noted. What previously would take half of a workday to set up is now done automatically, as managers no longer have to spend hours preparing campaigns, selecting recipients or sending test messages.  The Result. The university is currently in its 16th campaign, where it has seen a sharp decline (over x5) in ‘serial clickers’ (the organization's high-risk group) as well as those who only ‘occasionally take action with a phishing email. “at our request. CybeReady raised the difficulty of our latest campaign, and although the number of users who click has risen, we can see that overall, our faculty and administration are learning,” Ray said. “The system is definitely working and has generated much stronger awareness across the campus of email as a pervasive threat." “One of the other things I like about CybeReady's systems its comprehensive dashboard,” he added. “That I get all the info in one place where I can pull insights about our progress and any areas of weakness, which I use when making future campaign decisions.