I spent last night with five eloquent, passionate and above all opinionated colleagues arguing the pros and cons of security awareness training. We were doing this at the monthly Acumin RANT forum to a packed crowd who, as always, were not shy in holding back on their opinions.

The Crowd, who make RANT what it is!

We had two stand ins replacing Christian Toon and Kai Roer in the form of Bernadette Palmer and Andrew Agnes both of whom bought a huge amount of experience, opinion and humour to the evening. The lineup therefore was:

 For:

(The Award Winning) Javvad Malik, @j4vv4d

Bernadette Palmer

Andrew Agnes @sirjester

Against:

Myself

Geordie Stewart

Rowenna Fielding @infosecgeeklady

We did a standard pre vote just before starting (we garnered no votes and a lot of good natured laughs as expected!) and then we went straight into the standard For and Against cycle with me kicking off. Nobody had briefed me (or perhaps I hadn’t listened…) that we were reducing our standard six minutes each down to three! A quick reshuffle in my head and we were off. The photos may look like I am singing Karaoke, but beneath the entertaining exterior was my serious message!

I have posted my core arguments to this blog before so I won’t rehash them here again but what followed over the next eighty minutes was hugely interactive, passionate, thought provoking and hilarious! With a few dongle and fork gags thrown in this debate had everything! Of course there was no real conclusion but at the closing vote there was a small but very definite swing in our favour, hooray!

The Karaoke King!

What I found the most interesting however was that on the whole our arguments converged; we all acknowledged that information security training as it stands now is simply not working. What we do with it however, was where the real debate lay. Do you throw the whole lot out and start form scratch or do you continue to try and fix what we have? I think this is the dilemma we need to face up to sooner rather than later in the industry, once of course we accept that our training programs don’t work. That part is where the industry needs the most help.

I normally try and stay around after these kinds of events and listen to other peoples opinions, gather feedback and generally mingle. Tonight however I had dinner with a few folks (@jimshout, @j4vv4d, @sirjester, @jee2uu) to discuss an upcoming project. More on that in the next few months but it was a productive and exciting evening overall.

Finally, there was some footage taken of the evening by Gemma of Acumin; like all my footage if it ever sees the light of day I will get it posted here as soon as possible! As always a huge thank you to Gemma, Simon, Chris et al from Acumin for not only making this happen but asking me to be a part of it.

Andrew Agnes

Geordie Stewart