2020 KnowBe4 “Security Culture Report” finds a large gap exists between the best and worst performers for security culture
KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform, today announced it has launched a new research arm called KnowBe4 Research, with the branch’s first “Security Culture Report”.
In the 2020 “Security Culture Report”, data was collected from 120,050 employees in 1,107 organizations across 24 countries. There were a total of 17 industry sectors examined in detail. Results from this year’s report revealed a large gap between the best performers and the poor performers when it comes to security culture. The best performers were from Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance and the worst performers were from Education, Transportation and Energy & Utilities.
Security culture varies across industries. In the industry comparison report, all industries were compared according to their security culture scores and across each of the seven dimensions (Attitudes, Behaviors, Cognition, Communication, Compliance, Norms and Responsibilities) of security culture.
“When we acquired CLTRe, a research-based organization, we knew that our research capabilities would be greatly enhanced,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO, KnowBe4. “Given that we also have several former research analysts on staff, developing the KnowBe4 Research brand makes perfect sense as we look to position KnowBe4 for the future. This is the first report of many pieces of research to come out of this new arm of our organization.”
Perry Carpenter, chief evangelist and strategy officer for KnowBe4 and a former Gartner analyst who now heads this new division, added, “We created KnowBe4 Research as a special projects division. Our mission is to provide IT and security leaders with high quality, vendor neutral data-driven insights related to cybersecurity and the human element.”
"Both KnowBe4 and CLTRe were founded because the human element of security awareness was underserved," said Kai Roer, managing director for CLTRe, a KnowBe4 company. "Culture can significantly affect an organization's security. With this survey, we aim to provide the most comprehensive study of cybersecurity culture-related data. No other organization has taken this unique approach to evaluating security culture using seven different dimensions across multiple industries."
To download a copy of the KnowBe4 Security Culture Report, visit https://www.knowbe4.com/organizational-cyber-security-culture-research-report.
About KnowBe4
KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform, is used by more than 34,000 organizations around the globe. Founded by IT and data security specialist Stu Sjouwerman, KnowBe4 helps organizations address the human element of security by raising awareness about ransomware, CEO fraud and other social engineering tactics through a new-school approach to awareness training on security. Kevin Mitnick, an internationally recognized cybersecurity specialist and KnowBe4's Chief Hacking Officer, helped design the KnowBe4 training based on his well-documented social engineering tactics. Tens of thousands of organizations rely on KnowBe4 to mobilize their end users as the last line of defense.
