Cybersecurity professionals continue to face an uphill battle when it comes to securing their organizations’ infrastructures and systems.
That’s the problem with today’s security landscape. Threat actors are smarter, better organized, more sophisticated, and more numerous than ever before. They’re leveraging advanced techniques like generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and even offering sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service.Your security team needs to fend off every attack, whereas those same bad actors only need to succeed once. And the thing is, criminals aren’t always going to target software vulnerabilities — they’re going to focus on the path of least resistance: your people.
After all, why try to scale the wall of a fortress when you can trick someone into opening the gate?
The Weakest Link In Your Security Chain
There’s no shortage of concerning threat groups in the news. Most of us have heard of Cozy Bear, Akira, Sandworm, Salt Typhoon, Scattered Spider, and Noname057(16).
While it’s important to be aware of these criminal enterprises, they don’t actually present the greatest risk to your organization. Your own employees have the greatest capacity to disrupt business operations. And they often do, whether inadvertently or on purpose.
According to Verizon’s 17th Annual Data Breach Investigations Report, 68% of breaches included a non-malicious human element. In other words, over two-thirds of incidents resulted from either human error or social engineering.
Just think: all that time, energy, and money spent reducing external risks and it’s your own side letting you down.
The unfortunate reality is that anyone who touches a computer or endpoint is a security risk. Everyone, even your security team, makes mistakes. This means that even with the most sophisticated security measures in place, your security posture is only as robust as your ability to reduce the risks created by the human element.
Whether you like it or not, your attack surface is growing exponentially every day. Modern businesses no longer have isolated networks that act as walled gardens for corporate data – they have sprawling distributed ecosystems. Securing and monitoring the vast number of endpoints in those ecosystems is challenging enough without Kevin from HR accidentally downloading ransomware onto his company laptop.
And that’s precisely why hands-on cybersecurity training is so important, not just for your security team. You need to get everyone involved. After all, it’s much easier to avoid phishing emails when you learn to recognize them in a simulation than simply reading about them.
What is Cyber Security Hands-On Training?
There’s a lot of scope for improving the effectiveness of cyber security training. Everyone across the organization, not just the specialists in IT, needs to know how to identify phishing attacks, how to communicate instances of human error, and then what to do when a cyberattack occurs and the IT environment is under threat. Reacting in the right way at the right time can reduce the cost and damage.
Virtual hands-on training solutions allow you to simulate your networks and systems as a training ground. Trainees can learn how to spot or deal with security threats by recreating realistic scenarios to practice in. This takes place in a sandboxed environment, entirely separate from your actual networking infrastructure, which means that users can train freely without the risk of tampering with your company’s systems.
There are many names given to these types of simulation environments, such as cyber security labs, cyber range training, cyber security simulation training, or “breach and attack simulation”. They all offer real-world, hands-on cybersecurity training that immerses trainees in the reality of dealing with the complexities of a cyberattack. Allowing users to practice and experiment in a real-world scenario is the best way to prepare for the real thing.
It’s not a webinar. It’s not an in-depth written guide. It’s a real-life experience. First-hand knowledge.
That’s more valuable than passive knowledge acquisition could ever be.
The Benefits of Cybersecurity Training
So why is hands-on training the “secret sauce” for security awareness? Why does it work so well for teaching your people how to be safer? There are a few reasons for that.
Hands-On Training Boosts Engagement
Cybersecurity awareness training has a not-undeserved reputation for being painfully boring. Allowing people to learn by doing rather than showing and telling is essential to keeping them engaged. An interactive, hands-on experience achieves this, boosting knowledge, understanding, and retention.
What’s more, experiencing a simulated ransomware attack is a whole lot more exciting than reading about the many risks it poses.
Simulations Provide Insights Into Your Security Posture
Cybersecurity simulation training uses simulations of your real IT environment so you can gain valuable data while you train your staff. This can be used to improve and guide training, of course. However, it can also help you identify how and where to invest in IT security, such as identifying a blind spot in your incident response process.
It’s a Big Step Toward a Culture of Cybersecurity
From cybersecurity experts and C-suite personnel to line-of-business workers, everyone has a part to play in protecting your company’s systems and data. Immersive training helps people understand that. It shows them not only what’s required of them but also why and how they can do it. .
With that understanding, you can radically improve how people think about cybersecurity and how they act when an attack occurs.
Create Exceptional Cybersecurity Training with CloudShare
With CloudShare’s next-generation training platform, you can breathe life into training experiences and deliver better outcomes.
Our virtual hands-on training platform can help you get one step ahead of the cyber security threat. Spin up accurate environments and realistic scenarios in minutes. You can use these to war-game cybersecurity breaches so that your staff will be prepared for the next attack.
To learn more about how to effectively implement hands-on cyber security training and the benefits of the CloudShare platform, get in contact with the team at CloudShare today.
*Blog updated in March 2025
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