ICT player Espion has won a tender to design and deliver information security training for 44,000 United Nations (UN) employees worldwide.
Espion, in co-operation with e-learning service provider Sify, will design and develop a modularised training course about information security awareness in multiple languages to be released to the UN employees.
According to the schedule, both courses will be ready for release in early May 2014. After that date, Espion will manage maintenance of all content.
In the past 10 years, Espion has trained more than 5,000 professionals traversing Europe’s largest public and private organisations.
The company said it has seen an increase of 40pc in demand for its information security awareness training.
The company has long advocated that the best defence against unauthorised disclosure, transfer, modification, or destruction of corporate information is an effective security programme that includes educating staff.
Attitudes to security
Training manager Mark Wiley said the spike in demand for security training represents a positive change in organisations’ attitude toward the role staff play in protecting information.
“A key driver of change is spear phishing or ‘hacking the human’, which is one of the most common attack strategies for getting malware into an enterprise. Firms are worried they’ll be next to take the bait and are mitigating risks through building companywide human firewalls,” said Wiley.
“While the majority of growth has been generated from large organisations operating under proliferating regulation and legislation, as well as demands from stakeholders for greater security assurance, we think it’s only a matter of time before dedicated information security awareness training at work is commonplace.”
Security world image via Shutterstock
