Nearly half of all successful cyberattacks start with a negligent employee. Search engines will tell you it comes down to phishing, weak passwords and careless data handling. Look closer and all three say the same thing: this is about people.
A study by CIO / CSO / Computerwoche, based on 324 interviews with senior IT decision-makers across DACH, shows how NIS2 is reshaping the way organisations think about cybersecurity. But compliance and actual resilience are still far apart.
Behavior-oriented awareness measures success by observable change in risk behavior, not by knowledge completion, positive feedback scores or course consumption. It treats employees as human decision systems – not as information storage units.
An entire industry often offers customers products and services with little benefit. In the cybersecurity awareness market, they often do not aim to change behavior.
The CYBERDISE Freemium Edition is a free phishing tool and learning environment: technically speaking, an attack simulator and a lean LMS with a content editor and user management. Here are the answers on what it includes, what it needs to run and where its limitations are.
We provide a free solution for phishing simulations and cybersecurity training. Our motivation is about effectiveness, the market and our own standards – and marketing is not the primary purpose, but a side effect.
Our internal selection committee quickly reached consensus on who should receive this award: the University of Osnabrück. It receives the “Awareness Customer of the Year 2026” award for the exemplary implementation of CYBERDISE in an on-premise configuration.
In 2025, CYBERDISE won 10 new partners and 400,000 new users under license, yet missed its targets by a significant margin. Only conversations with colleagues showed that what the team achieved in 2025 was extraordinary.
Attitude and behavior are related, but they are not the same. Confusing them is one of the main reasons why many awareness programs fail to deliver lasting risk reduction.
A Wall Street Journal article drawing on the study “Understanding the Efficacy of Phishing Training in Practice” questions whether phishing simulations and awareness training lead to meaningful risk reduction. A growing body of empirical research shows that well-designed awareness programs do improve real-world cyber risk behavior; what often fails is a narrow interpretation of what awareness is, how it should be embedded and how success should be measured.
Like any other project, a cybersecurity awareness program can get off to a very bumpy start when it begins with an inappropriate mindset and management fails to recognize the value of awareness. We examined the mistakes and false expectations documented in a USENIX study and compared them with our own experience.
October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a time to remember that people remain the weakest link in cyber defense. This article traces how security awareness has evolved and what building a strong cybersecurity culture has in common with building a winning hockey team.