Security Awareness as a Service

Educate and train employees to protect your organization against cyber threats

Employees are the first and last line of defence against the dynamic and sophisticated threats facing organizations today. But preparing teams for real-world scenarios and determining how they’ll respond in the event of a security incident isn’t always easy.

Educational and training materials can provide them with the theoretical information they need to defend your organization from cyber threats. But how can you put this knowledge to the test?

PwC Canada’s Security Awareness as a Service program provides continuous and comprehensive education and training on emerging cyber threats, including how to avoid common risks and the steps to take in the event of a security incident. It uses a series of simulated campaigns that are adapted and targeted to specific users based on various factors and incorporates adaptive and behavioural factors powered by artificial intelligence.

This helps your employees play a proactive role in securing your firm and its assets. We’ve seen measurable improvements in the security posture of organizations that rethink how they inform and equip their employees, such as a significant drop in click rates on phishing emails through regular phishing awareness campaigns, for example.

Our approach

We know that cyber risks can occur anywhere, anytime. We’re ready to assist with a global team of intelligence-led and industry-centric solvers to help you build trust, promote resilience and enable your business through our human-led, tech-powered approach to uplifting cyber behaviours and culture within your organization.

That means tailoring our end-to-end cyber awareness programs to fit the unique needs of your organization and working closely with departments or team members to enable them to be prepared to navigate the distinct threats confronting your business.

Our Security Awareness as a Service program helps your organization accelerate your ambitions and close capability gaps by assessing how diligently employees screen emails, text messages and phone calls for questionable content. We then recommend how you can evolve cybersecurity behaviours and cultural aspects within your organization.

Adaptive training modules

Educate staff using our adaptive training videos and exercises to stay abreast of the latest and largest threats.

Enhance user awareness

Train your employees to spot and report suspicious emails (phishing), SMS text messages (SMShing) and phone calls. This helps maintain continuous situational awareness and encourages information sharing.

Foster diligence

Create a security-conscious culture in which staff have knowledge and awareness of security threats.

Reduce risk of data breaches

Reduce the financial and business risks of data breaches caused by human errors.

Safeguard sensitive data

Help employees understand data privacy and security safeguards, and train them to protect personally identifiable information and other sensitive data.

We help you manage the entire life cycle of cybersecurity education. We use a data-driven and behavioural approach to prioritize and design interventions and structural enablers that create compatible staff experiences by actively nudging their behaviour in the right direction.

We work with you to select threat themes from PwC’s regularly updated cyber threat intelligence of existing and emerging threats. We’ll then build out and launch education campaigns in collaboration with your cybersecurity team.

As you run your campaigns, it’s important to capture data that helps you better understand your risks and embrace a culture of cybersecurity. This lets you create targeted and adaptive campaigns based on a user’s department, organizational unit, level, role and other factors.

Next, we provide key performance and behavioural indicators using data-driven analytics to help inform new employee habits and produce risk scores for individual users based on their performance in the simulation and a cumulative risk score for your organization calculated from individual user scores.

How we can help

Help your staff spot dangerous phishing emails

Adaptive phishing simulations are dummy phishing emails that your business can send to staff members to test their online behaviours and gauge their familiarity with common phishing schemes. These emails mimic cyber threats that professionals may encounter within and outside of the workplace. The benefits include:

Assessing your employees’ capability to spot and avoid online dangers such as social engineering techniques, ransomware and other threats.
Reducing risks, developing threat resistance and fostering a security-conscious organizational culture.
Maintaining up-to-date knowledge in a changing technology landscape that includes generative artificial intelligence threats such as deepfake audio and video messages.

Equip your employees to recognize malicious SMS text messages

SMiShing, or SMS phishing, is a phishing scam variant that uses text messages to trick users into divulging confidential information. Our simulations:

Test your employees in the same way a threat actor would operate and gauge their understanding of these scams.
Establish a baseline on how vulnerable your employees are to SMiShing attacks, letting you measure their progress over time.

Assess your teams’ ability to discern vishing attempts

Voice phishing, or vishing, is the telephone equivalent of phishing. Like its email counterpart, vishing tricks users into revealing confidential information over the phone by posing as a trusted entity. Our program helps you:

Better protect your organization against vishing attempts and reduce the risk of your employees becoming vulnerable targets for scammers.
Protect against emerging threats from disruptive technologies, such as voice messages created by generative artificial intelligence.

Take an intelligence-led approach to monitoring emerging threats

PwC Canada publishes ad hoc advisories on emerging threats, including their potential impact. Our services include:

High-level guidance on the existing and emerging threats that are most likely to target your business or industry.
Content such as videos, interactive quizzes and infographics that create a more engaging learning experience.