Cyber Guru: Closing the cyber security awareness & training gap

Cybersecurity experts and industry leaders agree that the threat of cyber-attacks is rapidly increasing and evolving, with employees being the most vulnerable line of defense. 

According to IBM Cost of Data Breach Report, a stunning 83% of organisations reported having incurred more than one data breach. Additionally, 82% of data breaches are reportedly caused by human error.

Despite advances in technology, employees continue to engage in unsafe behaviours, making them the primary target for cybercriminals. 

Cyber Guru, the Rome-based cybersecurity training and awareness software scale-up enables enterprises to reduce the impact of such unsafe behaviours by focusing on the human factor.

Helping 260+ organisations transform employee behaviour

We first partnered with Gianni Baroni and the Cyber Guru team in May 2021 as they were doubling down on product development and starting their international expansion.

Since then, Cyber Guru has grown 10x in less than 2 years, adding more than 180 leading corporations and public administrations as customers during this period. The team has demonstrated strong product-market fit in every enterprise market opportunity, and now serves more than 500,000 active users. The company has also obtained numerous recognitions and qualifications.

Improving the first line of defence against cyber attacks

For most organisations, the next critical security challenge lies in filling a fatal awareness gap. Despite the numerous technological barriers put in place by cybersecurity engineers, many data and infrastructure hacking attempts still succeed via the simplest manipulation of human behaviour.

Using innovative experiential educational methods, Cyber Guru’s training and awareness platform can effectively strengthen the human factor, converting it from the weak link in the defensive chain into the first line of protection against cybercrime.

These training courses include:

·   Cyber Guru Awareness: cognitive training [Knowledge]

·   Cyber Guru Phishing: inductive training [Perception of danger]

·   Cyber Guru Channel: experiential training [Readiness]

The engaging and gamified solutions are designed to increase resistance in three specific areas: risk perception, readiness in responding to attacks, and threat awareness. 

Modern techniques of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) also make the platform completely autonomous. Cyber Guru can create permanent training programs and implement adaptive simulation campaigns in full independence.

Proactive cybersecurity awareness and training

“With our training courses, we turn human behaviour into a first line of defence against cybercrime.”
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– Gianni Baroni, founder and CEO of Cyber Guru

The economic impact of cybercrime is staggering, with an estimated annual cost of $6.1 trillion globally. Shockingly, 88% of data breaches are caused by human error, costing an average of $4.35 million to remediate each breach and taking an average of 277 days to resolve. 

These figures highlight the urgent need for effective training and awareness programs to address the human factor in cybersecurity. By strengthening this factor (human behaviour), organisations can significantly reduce their vulnerability to cyber attacks and mitigate the potentially catastrophic consequences of a breach. 

Cyber Guru is already operating in Italy, Spain, and France, and is planning to expand into several neighbouring countries, including the UK, Germany, and more.

Building cyber-resilient organisations

We are in the middle of a true digital transformation, and the enterprise cybersecurity stack has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years as CISOs respond to an ever more complex set of threats. 

However, for all the investment and innovation, the simplest form of attack (email phishing) continues to be the most dangerous and prolific. An employee clicking malicious content is a truly universal problem. We are proud to continue supporting Cyber Guru as they develop breakthrough solutions to solve the biggest challenges in cyber security awareness.