Employees are your first line of defense. No matter how sophisticated your security operations are, a single click, one misplaced device, or one overlooked warning sign can unravel your best-laid plans.
That’s where corporate security awareness comes in. It equips each and every employee with the knowledge and tools they need to become part of your defense strategy. In this article, we’ll cover what you need to know to assess your current corporate security awareness posture and offer actionable, repeatable steps you can take to develop a workforce that’s ready to detect and defend.
What is Corporate Security Awareness?
Corporate security awareness is the ongoing process of educating and reminding employees to be vigilant of, avoid, and report threats to the organization’s physical and digital assets. It’s not a one-time training or compliance checkbox, but a mindset. Awareness encompasses phishing attempts, social engineering, badge tailgating, data exfiltration, insider threats, and suspicious behavior on both internal and external platforms.
When implemented correctly, a corporate security awareness program equips employees at every level with the tools and knowledge to identify warning signs early on. This minimizes detection and response times while strengthening the organization’s security posture and making human error less exploitable.
Assessing Current Security Awareness Levels
Before you can improve corporate security awareness, you need to identify the areas of weakness. Check for common vulnerabilities, such as weak passwords, unencrypted devices, and misconfigured cloud services.
Perform internal security audits with a focus on access controls, data handling, device usage policies, and third-party vendor exposure. Identify blind spots between documented policies and actual employee behavior.
Compare policies and actual behaviors against established best practices, such as NIST 800-53 or ISO 27001. This will also help you to prioritize based on risk and provide the baseline required to make your case for budget, personnel, and training time.
This assessment provides a realistic picture of the gap between theoretical security posture and actual day-to-day behaviors. And that’s where your corporate security awareness training should begin.
12 Ways to Improve Corporate Security Awareness
Improving corporate security awareness involves integrating security into your daily operations, rather than merely checking off boxes on an annual checklist. Here’s how to develop a workforce that actively protects your organization.
1. Make Corporate Security a Leadership Priority
Culture starts at the top. If executives openly ignore MFA or skirt policies, don’t expect employees to take it seriously. Ensure leadership follows and models all expected behaviors, such as reporting phishing attempts, utilizing secure collaboration tools, and adhering to the same password hygiene standards.
2. Establish Clear Security Policies and Procedures
Employees can’t follow what they don’t understand. Policies should be simple, accessible, and reinforced often. Your policies and procedures should cover remote work, BYOD, access controls, encryption, reporting obligations, and what not to do.
3. Integrate Security Messaging Into Onboarding
If new hires only hear about security once they’re already on the job, they’re going to be less interested in putting in the effort to get it right. Make security a part of the onboarding process so that employees are aware of the expectations from the moment they join the company. Don’t just tell them what they need to do, but explain why it’s so important.
4. Implement Regular Security Training Programs
Annual security training leaves too much time for vulnerabilities to arise and for people to forget what they learned in those one-off sessions. Instead, deliver short, tactical lessons on an ongoing basis. Identify the unique attack surface of each role, department, or group and build targeted, role-based training.
5. Conduct Regular Risk-Based Assessments
Use threat intelligence, incident logs, and red team findings to identify roles and workflows with the highest risk levels. Target your awareness efforts to the most exposed areas.
6. Use Breach Intelligence to Educate Employees
Generic warnings may sound canned and fall on deaf ears. But relevant examples from real-world incidents make threats tangible.
Demonstrate with anonymized samples of leaked employee credentials from known breaches, screenshots of internal data found on the dark web, and examples of successful or failed phishing attempts that made it past security gateways.
7. Leverage Internal Communications Channels
Employees see so many irrelevant emails each day that your training and policy messages may be lost in the flood. Utilize Slack, newsletters, digital signage, and town halls to maintain security visibility.
Better yet, embed security reminders directly into workflows (e.g., Outlook signatures, calendar reminders). The messages should be clear and concise, focusing on one risk, one example, and one recommended action.
8. Provide Clear Reporting Channels for Security Incidents
If a user is in doubt about where to report a suspicious phishing email or where to turn if they notice a suspicious person on-premises, you’ve already failed.
Provide a single, straightforward reporting path that’s widely promoted throughout the organization, such as by including an easy-to-find link on the company intranet, displaying posters in the company breakroom, or sending periodic email reminders.
9. Track and Counter Common Behavioral Red Flags
Badge tailgating, shared account credentials, and unauthorized use of cloud apps: these are all security threats enabled not by advanced attacks, but by a lack of basic awareness.
Look for the telltale signs, and train managers to recognize them. Encourage anonymous reporting, and integrate insider threat indicators into your awareness program.
10. Integrate OSINT into Awareness Campaigns
Attackers don’t guess; they do their homework, often using open-source intelligence (OSINT) to target employees.
Explain how data from LinkedIn job changes, social media posts, location check-ins, and image metadata is routinely used to craft convincing spear phishing messages. Provide guidance for posting securely and practicing basic personal OpSec without resorting to scare tactics.
11. Gamify the Learning Process
Education doesn’t have to be boring. Spruce up your existing training with quizzes, department competitions, or even “security scavenger hunts” for real-life issues around the office (outdated or missing software firewalls, default passwords, unprotected access points, etc.).
Provide meaningful incentives (e.g., bonus PTO, public recognition, team shoutouts) to reinforce participation and make learning an active, not passive, experience.
12. Tie Awareness to Measurable Outcomes
Measure and track the things that matter. For example, that may include awareness training course completion, phishing test performance, number of incidents by department or team, and rates of reporting suspicious activity or security concerns.
Whatever the key success metrics, ensure that you can clearly tie your efforts to them. Use a dashboard to visualize progress and let teams see where they rank in comparison to others, as well as where they still need improvement.
Final Thoughts
Corporate security awareness is not only about compliance but also visibility, timing, and response. The sooner your people can spot something amiss, the faster your security team can respond.
However, for awareness to be effective, it can’t be left to chance. It requires a system, a culture that reinforces it, and the right tools to bring early risk indicators to the surface.
ShadowDragon’s tools can give your teams the visibility they need to understand what’s happening beyond the firewall, gathering intelligence from over 500 sources and more than 1,000 endpoints. From identifying impersonation attempts and social engineering infrastructure to tracking real-world threats against executives and brand assets, ShadowDragon helps close the loop on what your employees are seeing in the real world with what threat actors are doing online.
Contact us today to schedule a demo and learn how ShadowDragon can augment and enhance your corporate security awareness program.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are automated security tools enough to protect a company?
No. While essential, tools can’t stop all threats. Human behavior, awareness, and judgment remain critical in detecting and preventing breaches.
How do we measure the success of security awareness programs?
Track metrics like phishing test click rates, training completion, incident reporting rates, and behavioral improvements over time.
What’s one of the biggest emerging threats to corporate security?
AI-powered social engineering and deepfake-based impersonation attacks are rapidly evolving and becoming more difficult to detect.
Where can companies find free security awareness resources?
Trusted sources include CISA (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency), NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre), and StaySafeOnline.org. OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) and SANS Institute also provide a number of free cybersecurity training resources.
