\u201cWe spent a lot of time discerning the contents and making sure that it was the right tone and digestible for business owners,\u201d Mandy\u00a0D\u2019Autremont, the federation\u2019s vice-president of marketing partnerships, said in an interview. \u201cWe wanted to get it right.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t want to put something out there that was rushed.\u201d<\/p>\n Cybersecurity Academy is available in English and French.<\/p>\n Like many gamification platforms, participants can earn badges for successfully completing training sessions. Businesses can then decide how to reward top finishers.<\/p>\n As an extra incentive for playing, the federation is offering a cash bonus: Every person that completes a course is entered into a draw for a $10,000 prize. One individual in each province and territory is eligible for a $500 prize.<\/p>\n For a limited time, CFIB is also opening up access to non-members, with a free temporary membership to allow them to complete the Cybersecurity Academy courses.<\/p>\n Designed with the help of Mastercard and built on a learning platform hosted by Toronto-based Horizn<\/a>, CFIB Cybersecurity Academy starts with four courses: Cybersecurity basics; Detecting Social Engineering; Protecting Your Business from Cybercrime; and What To Do When You\u2019re Hacked.<\/p>\n Early next year, courses on recognizing fraud and how to handle issues with credit cards will be added.<\/p>\n Each course has five lessons, which take between five and 10 minutes to complete.<\/p>\n In announcing the program the CFIB said a survey of members showed only 11 per cent of respondents said their firms offered mandatory cybersecurity training to their employees in the past year. Another eight per cent provided optional training<\/p>\n \u201cWe have been surveying our members on cybersecurity a number of times over the last couple of years,\u201d said \u00a0D\u2019Autremont. \u201cWhat we heard from them consistently is they don\u2019t know where to start. The majority are not offering cybersecurity awareness training to their employees. But it [cybersecurity] is still a huge risk for small businesses. Forty-five per cent have experienced a random attack in the past year. Twenty-seven per cent had targeted attacks in the last year. It\u2019s an increasingly threatening issue that has a huge cost to business owners.<\/p>\n \u201cCFIB has the audience to get this kind of education program into the inboxes of business owners. Even more important is making the training approachable to them, giving them tools and templates they can immediately start to use.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked why in 2022 small business owners still say they don\u2019t know where to start in cybersecurity, D\u2019Autremont noted that some feel they are too small to be a target of threat actors. \u201cThat is a common theme we hear,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd small business owners have a million and one things they have to focus on,\u201d she added. \u201cThey don\u2019t have teams dedicated to every aspect of their business. They don\u2019t necessarily have an IT team. They are their own IT team.\u201d<\/p>\n She said the CFIB feels it can help play a role to raise the profile of cybersecurity to business owners and make it easier for them, and their employees, to learn about it.<\/p>\n The academy also offers templates to help businesses set up a cybersecurity framework. Templates include how to create an emergency contact list and an incident response plan, how to inventory hardware and software, and how to create a policy on the proper use of social media.<\/p>\n Ideally, D\u2019Autremont said, 20 per cent of the federation\u2019s businesses will enroll in the academy.<\/p>\n The post CFIB launches Cybersecurity Academy for small, medium businesses<\/a> first appeared on IT World Canada<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gamification platform will help SMB owners and employees learn about cybersecurity, says Canadian Federation of Independen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[737,391,738,396,448,393,275],"class_list":["post-32389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-careers-education","category-security","tag-cfib","tag-di","tag-online-training","tag-postmedia","tag-security-awareness","tag-security-strategies","tag-top-story"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32389"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32461,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32389\/revisions\/32461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Screen](\"https:\/\/i.itworldcanada.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Screen-shot-of-home-page-of-CFIB-Cybersecurity-Academy.jpg\")