Welcome to Armata Cyber Security Awareness Month 2022

There’s no denying it – cybercrime is on the rise in South Africa. In the last two years alone, ransomware incidents have risen a staggering amount. According to Mimecast’s State of Email Security report for 2022, 60% of South African organisations suffered a ransomware attack in 2021, compared to 47% in 2020.

Data breaches are serious business, with potentially devastating consequences for the victims involved. The biggest headline grabber this year was the TransUnion breach in March – which saw 10 million consumers and 600 000 businesses affected on various levels by having sensitive information, from names and ID numbers to banking details, exposed.

How, you wonder? Brazilian hacking group N4aughtysecTU were able to gain access to one of TransUnion’s servers by cracking the password of an active customer account – yup, it was “password”.

Awareness Training: Every Network’s First Line of Defence

And that’s why we’re starting off our first ever Armata Cyber Security Awareness Month with the first, and arguably most important, aspect of any cybersecurity plan: User Awareness Training.

Week Two will focus on Penetration Testing – the art of discovering hidden vulnerabilities (like old passwords that are easily cracked) within your network and applications. Week Three moves to Vulnerability Management and we end off on Week Four with EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response).

As important as everything listed above may be for creating a robust cybersecurity solution, User Awareness Training stands out as an essential element.

Users are either the biggest risk or the first line of defence when it comes to maintaining the integrity of any network. Knowing the importance of strong passwords and when you’re being phished via dodgy emails with weird looking links or files can mean the difference between preventing a data breach entirely or scrambling to contain one later.

Staying One Step Ahead of Hackers

TransUnion may have suffered one of the biggest data breaches in the country this year, but they’re not alone. And with South Africa moving up the ranks to become the third most targeted country in the world when it comes to cybercrimes, they’re definitely not going to be the last.

Hackers have been known to target everyone from large corporates to small businesses and even hospitals and healthcare providers. So, it’s safe to assume if your business is online in any way, you’re a target too.

Don’t panic. You don’t need to learn things the hard way – not when we have the tools to teach you the tricks of the trade in a fun, safe and controlled environment. Armata’s Cyber Awareness Training platform is cloud-based, which means you don’t need to invest in any additional hardware. It’s also extremely easy to setup and use, offering the latest training protocols, with over 40 real-world spear-phishing incidents for users to learn from.

It also includes reporting tools to give you an idea of how cyber smart your company is as a whole, and the areas where you should really worry.

No one will be saving ‘password’ as their password after this. Promise.