As a research scientist, I was learning about the world and problems to explore. Then, as a security awareness manager, I had to solve those problems in practice.
But one person can only reach so far. Luckily, I am now surrounded by a whole team that’s dedicated to helping other people build security awareness, skills and culture in their organizations.
I see it every day. The world is in dire need of more cyber resilience, and we’re all in to solve these problems. This is what drives us to build better solutions, and help more people stay secure.
In this post, I’ll share a bit about why we’re putting so much effort into PrepJam right now. Our interactive cybersecurity exercise tool, as we embark on its growth journey alongside you.
The silhouette of a solution
Two years ago, I was fortunate to take part in two learning experiences which ignited a creative spark in me:
When 75 participants spent an entire evening at an international security conference in London doing a cyber preparedness exercise, all very social and great learning, although a bit chaotic, too!
At a meetup with our network for security awareness professionals in Norway, where we played a board game designed to prepare factory managers for a cyber incident, quite specifically.
Common to both is they were entirely analogous experiences. No digital tools whatsoever, and lots of effort put into design and facilitation. And with great results, thanks to that effort!
Nevertheless, having planned and facilitated a couple of incident response exercises myself before, I could relate to both the engaging experience, and the effort needed for planning, organizing and getting everyone through to achieve our learning objectives.
Yet, the need for a scalable solution landed upon us when a business leader soon after told me, on behalf of her board of fellow business leaders from 18 society critical companies:
We need more cyber preparedness.
And not just for their own large companies, but throughout their entire supply chain of small and medium-sized providers. They needed something that really scales.
A prototype of building blocks
Back at our office, we had a look at our technology stack and product ideas. Couldn’t we just mash it all up together in a slightly different way, and it would become a more interactive way of telling stories?
Three months later, we were invited to do a talk on cyber preparedness at a business forum.
With only a day before the event, we had completed a very first test session with our brand new exercise technology with a deepfake scam scenario. So, we decided to go all in, turning our 30 minute talk into a live exercise for the 50 people who had signed up.
Feedback after the event showed that 80% of participants were on the ambassadors end of a so-called Net Promoter Score (NPS) – which means, they would actively recommend it the experience to their colleagues.
So, back at the office again, we decided to keep developing, the software, scenario content and our methodology.
Everyone loves a good story
In 2024, we trained more than 5000 IT, security and preparedness professionals from 3500 companies on a 60 event road-show with our interactive exercise tool, which is now called PrepJam.
We have learned a lot about designing good exercise sessions with good learning outcomes and not just for people working with cyber resilience on a daily basis.
In fact, we’ve seen how PrepJam sessions work great with any live audience, including employees in general. The key is a good storyline, group discussions, decisions to make, some fun elements of surprise, and an environment where it is safe to participate regardless of skills level.
PrepJam has become just as much of a tool for security awareness, and training of basic skills.
We now know that it is a tool for involving people, enabling conversations about security between anyone in an audience.
You can therefore invite hundreds of colleagues to each session.
We’ve also learned how to succeed with virtual and hybrid sessions, because this is what it takes to meet the demand we’re experiencing now.
Scaling to the next level
While the world is getting more artificially intelligent by the minute, we are all still people in it, with fundamentally human needs, emotions, beliefs and aspirations to do things we care about.
Even in a crisis, or when something goes not as planned, people may very well be the ones to save the day, despite our often unpredictable nature. We are still the ones able to improvise, and solve complex problems never seen before with care for others, in a way which machines cannot.
Our mission at Secure Practice is to help people stay safe from cybercrime.
Scaling PrepJam means that we want to make these learning experiences available to as many people as possible. This, in turn, means that we need to scale our interactive exercise tool into an easily accessible service, rather than requiring you to give us a sales call to get a quote for Secure Practice Enterprise subscriptions.
Launching PrepJam.com as a standalone service will not be a departure from our existing offering, but we’ll build and grow this experience to global scale for everyone who wants to do interactive storytelling.
To make security training more powerful: Don’t just tell people what can go wrong. Show them how they can handle it.
Let’s PrepJam!
[ Erlend’s blog was originally posted on Secure Practice’s blog ]
