Awareness

The Awareness Focus Group aims at increasing awareness among citizens and organizations through a variety of means including campaigns, best practices, tips & tricks, and informative sessions.

Objectives

It provides a trusting and supportive environment where security awareness professionals collaborate and acquire knowledge enabling them to build and enhance security awareness programmes. Membership of this Focus Group offers these professionals the added insight, creativity and confidence to take their programme to the next level of excellence.

Topics

During the plenary meetings, members present their own awareness initiatives, showing samples of their programme materials and resources for the benefit of other members.

Evaluating the effectiveness of security awareness and training programmes is critical for minimizing organizations’ human security risk. Members discuss current practices in the market and share their experiences on the effectiveness of trainings and awareness raising tools deployed in their organizations.

In case of a cyber-attack, members also explain how they handled the crisis communication being a central part of any cyber incident handling management plan.

The Coalition is a partner of the DigitALL ecosystem and is consequently mindful of the vulnerability of specific groups of people, whose lack of digital skills puts them at risk of dropping out. By making cybersecurity more accessible and inclusive, the Coalition aims for a more equitable and secure digital environment for everyone. A recent initiative of the Awareness Focus Group to this end is ‘Stay Safe Online‘ (cf. infra).

Practices

The Awareness Focus Group convenes every quarter in-person and has been active since the creation of the Coalition. The Focus Group has grown substantially over the years both in membership and activities. It has created several sub-groups to work on specific deliverables.

The smaller sized sub-groups are a response to the challenge of maintaining and strengthening the dynamism and interactivity of the members. They facilitate the realization of deliverables that contribute to the Coalition’s mission. They complement the quarterly plenary meetings. Each sub-group is assigned a brief segment of the plenary meeting to present their activities and achievements of the previous quarter.

National awareness campaign

Every year Focus Group members join efforts with the Centre for Cyber Security Belgium (CCB) to develop the national awareness campaign, which is traditionally launched during the European Cyber Security Month in October. The members also use their internal and external networks to help circulate the message and campaign materials online as such ensuring a large coverage.

Hands-on awareness tools

The goal of this sub-group is raising awareness among small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), which constitute the backbone of the Belgian economy but are often the weak spot in the value chain from a cyber security point of view. For this purpose, the sub-group has developed a range of interesting, hands-on instruments, which are freely available on the Coalition website. A latest realization is the Kahoot e-learning tool. Members of this sub-group regularly act as guest speakers in various fora geared towards the SME segment to promote these tools.

Online security awareness

This sub-group has launched the ‘Stay Safe Online’ initiative, a series of simple and accessible online training courses on cyber security. In the first part, “Look where you’re going!”, people learn to identify fake messages sent to their inboxes or smart phone applications. The other modules are currently being developed. This sub-group is working in close cooperation with the CCB and the modules are co-branded with Safeonweb, the most important brand of the CCB.

Gamification

By embedding the principles of gamification into their cybersecurity awareness campaigns, organizations can transform behaviours in much more efficient ways. This working group analyzes and tests various gamification techniques and endeavours to create a Coalition gamification tool in cooperation with partners.

Cyber security at schools

This sub-group strives for a future in which young people (age 6 to 25) develop a natural reflex for cyber security, are challenged by it, and motivated to integrate their cyber creativity and passion into their (professional) lives. A recent achievement of this sub-group is the development of an EDUbox Cybersecurity in partnership with the VRT and Betternet. The tool was officially launched during the 2023 Safer Internet Day event organized in cooperation with the Federal Public Service Economy, SMEs, Middle Classes and Energy.

Security awareness metrics

Members of this sub-group share experiences on cyber security metrics. This sub-group arose from the need among our members to be able to measure the extent to which sensitization actions within the organization affect employees’ behaviour. This could be a powerful reporting tool to the executive management, which must approve the budget for such actions. The sub-group tries to identify some relevant metrics to measure these behavioural changes within an organization.

Cyber security awareness & culture manager training

This training programme combined members’ best awareness practices in cyber security and tackled the challenges of behavioural and cultural change. Each module consisted of both theoretical and practical exercises leading the participants to create their own cyber security awareness plan by applying the processes created and refined by the expert trainers. Participants who successfully completed the programme received a certification supported by the Cyber Security Coalition and the CCB. During four consecutive years, this sub-group trained over 90 trainees. The training has been suspended for the time being. The ultimate goal is to develop an online version of the training.

Phishing

The sub-group is designing an effective phishing assessment programme to be included as a part of a complete Phishing Deployment Package.

How to join the group

The Awareness Focus Group is comprised of member participants who are responsible for developing and implementing the security awareness programmes for their respective organizations. Coalition membership is the only condition to adhere to this Focus Group.

Become a member