Transcript
Ashley Rose (0:00)
I would say if security awareness and training worked, we'd have fixed the problem by now. And the industry knows this. I think it's time to say that out loud and to really recognize it. And so the future is really not blaming the human. That's not a strategy. Right? It's not a security strategy.
Podcast Host (0:23)
This is KISS as a primary target
Ashley Rose (0:27)
for ransomware campaigns, security and testing and performance, risk and compliance. We can actually automate that, take that data and use it.
Krista (0:39)
Joining me now is Ashley Rose, CEO and co founder at Living Security. And today we're discussing why the human risk really is the next frontier in cybersecurity. So, Ashley, thanks for joining me and welcome.
Ashley Rose (0:50)
Yeah, Krista, thank you so much for having me.
Krista (0:52)
Okay, so this interview is really interesting to me because there's a couple of sort of things that, you know, I've been in this space for a while, you know, over a decade, and the same sort of phrases just keep resurfacing. And one of those would probably be, you know, people really are the weakest link. But what's interesting is that's been the narrative in the cybersecurity space, or more broadly the tech space for 20 or so years. So why do you think nothing's really improved since then?
Ashley Rose (1:21)
Yeah, so over the last couple of decades, you know, we saw an emergence of, you know, a pretty fast growing and large category security awareness and training. But security awareness and training was really the industry continuing to try to teach and educate, but never actually effectively measuring the result and measuring the behavior of the user and whether or not it was improving, whether it was changing. And so the output that we leveraged to essentially try to measure whether or not this was effective was really that those breach statistics, right, 80 to 90% of cybersecurity incidents, breaches are a result of some sort of human based initiative, human decision. And so we had these two, like, very disparate or I would say, conflicting signals. We saw security awareness and training growing in a fast pace, yet human initiated cybersecurity incidents continued to remain, you know, the number one cause of breach. And so double clicking into that, what you actually recognize is that security awareness and training was actually never designed for risk reduction. It was designed for a compliance checkbox. So those are two very completely different jobs and they have different outcomes. And so what are unique insight was that without data and human behavior, we saw that security teams were actually really flying blind and they were unable, they were unequipped to essentially improve what they didn't measure. And so that narrative, as you suggested, in the question continued to stay the same because vendors were benefiting from the same teaching curriculum being recycled every year. It was a compliance mandate. Every court, every organization had to have security awareness and training to check that box. And so the market kept growing despite the fact that the incidence of the breaches were not reducing. Therein lies the problem. Let's point the finger, point back to the people and say, stupid users, people are the weakest link. But the real problem was the lack of context, signals and ultimately personalized guidance.
