Security Awareness Best Practices for 2026: Building and Improving Your Program
Summary
A practical guide to security awareness programs recommends ongoing, role-based training, realistic phishing simulations, frequent reinforcement, easy reporting, and using program results and incident lessons to improve employee security habits.
Key points
- Make training brief, relevant to employees’ roles, and focused on practical decisions such as verifying payment changes and reporting suspicious messages.
- Use varied phishing simulations for email, QR codes, fake login pages, attachments, collaboration tools, and text messages; coach participants rather than shame them.
- The article recommends using NIST’s Phish Scale to assess how difficult simulated phishing emails are to detect.
- Reinforce learning between formal sessions with microlearning, reminders, incident examples, and prompts about data handling.
- Tailor scenarios to role-specific risks, including payment fraud for finance, impersonation for executives, and fake support requests for IT administrators.
- Review results across departments and job functions, improve reporting workflows, and use incident lessons to update training and simulations.
Article Details
- Topic
- Best practices for building, measuring, and improving security awareness programs through engaging training, phishing simulations, role-based learning, and continuous reinforcement.