EAB Global Opens A Universe Of
Possibilities With Living Security’s

Human Risk Management Solution

The Client

Brian Markham, CISO for EAB Global, a leading provider of education, technology, and marketing and enrollment solutions to the higher education market has been a cybersecurity executive for over 20 years. He has experience advising, building, and managing teams and complex organizations. One thing that he kept coming back to was being able to understand behavior changes in his organization to unlock the door to preemptive vigilance. The industry norms of measuring improved engagement metrics did not answer this question.

“For me the catalyst was wanting to go up in maturity—basically, to level up. In the past, we would look at things like, did people open emails? Did people show up to awareness sessions? Did people do the online training? And we would look at those numbers, and if the numbers went up, we were happy. As I matured as a leader and learned more, I realized that that’s not really enough. It’s not so much the engagement there that I want, it’s really the behavior change that I want.”

CISO for EAB Global

brian brian Eab_global_logo

“Excel spreadsheets, and what’s in your head cannot scale. And what I had found was I was way too concerned with data and numbers that other people wanted and not concerned enough with the numbers that I wanted and I needed. How do you connect those dots to turn it from data to actual intelligence that you can take action upon?”

Understanding the behavior changes that would be necessary to uplevel their approach to security training was the key to improved vigilance, rather than working after the fact to plug holes and train once a breach had already occurred.

The key to evolving the approach at EAB was data. Brian knew all of the data was there, but finding
a way to centralize and correlate the data to monitor changes, find trends, and make decisions that impact the security culture and posture at EAB was key for a successful transition.

The Solution

ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES WITH AN EFFICIENT, SCALABLE APPROACH TO DATA

Brian made the decision to pilot Living Security’s Unify Insights to better understand his workforce’s behaviors and what changes he could drive in an efficient, scalable way.

Brian’s experience with Unify “opened up a universe of possibilities” he hadn’t considered before, and gave him the power to crack into data in more efficient, analytical ways. It gave him the power to dig into what was happening and address risky behaviors before they became an incident.

“When I was presented with the opportunity to give Unify Insights a whirl, I jumped at it, because it was a chance for me to correlate all that data. And in doing so, I could learn things that I hadn’t known before. I could see who was getting targeted the most with phishing messages. I could go into the business unit. I could go into people with similar job roles. Things that I could do if I wanted to go into Workday and then go into Microsoft O365 and pull that together, but with Unify it’s just built in.”

The Experience

ANSWERS FOR THE RIGHT QUESTIONS WITH A HUMAN RISK MANAGEMENT APPROACH

Living Security’s Unify Insights brought Brian and EAB Global the visibility to guide human behavior in a way that empowered people, rather than punished them. It gave them the ability to learn, adapt, and, in his words, “figure out the best tactics, techniques, and approaches to help make us all more successful.”

Brian remains passionate about using intelligence like this to make people better, thinking of each employee as a colleague, not a potential risk. Maturing from a Security Awareness and Training approach to Human Risk Management approach was made possible through Unify Insights.

“When I think about human risk management, I’m not thinking so much about the Incident Response part. I’m thinking about... Why did that thing happen? What was the behavior? What was the action? What were the circumstances that led that to happen? Do I have any control or influence over that? Is there something that I can do to change that behavior or to prevent things like that from happening in the future?”

ABOUT LIVING SECURITY

Living Security is a cybersecurity training company, working to reduce cyber risk through impactful, human-focused training.

Living Security’s focal point is decreasing human error–the greatest cybersecurity risk enterprises face–through immersive and intelligence-driven training solutions. Their science-based approach drives user engagement and reinforces positive security behaviors, integrates threat intelligence to train on the most relevant user-facing threats and delivers metrics that enable companies to measure the effectiveness of the program.

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