Paladin Cyber’s Shield secures companies against ransomware and other common attacks by layering critical protections into one easy solution. To keep the business secure against cyber threats, the company needs to have an overview of all of the risky actions that their employees take and instructions on how to handle them.

The most important part of making companies more secure is always keeping an eye on what is happening in your organization.

• Does everyone finish their training?
• Are there any employees that don’t know how to recognize a phishing email?

This case study presents the report that has been built for the admins of the company to assess these risks and keep their companies safe.

My role

This is a project that I worked on in 2019. I led the design process of this project from the initial kick-off to the final deliverables.

For this project, I collaborated with the rest of the product team, having weekly reviews of the progress and with the main stakeholders. After the design has been finalized, I supported the engineering team during the implementation.

Cyber Readiness Level

Our promise is that we will keep your business secure. In order for that to happen, we need you to use the tools provided and train your employees to identify danger and avoid cybercriminal tactics.

In order for that to happen, the person responsible to administrate this task needs to have an overview of the general Cyber Readiness Level, recommendations on what needs to be done to improve, and the actions that are taken by the employees.

Design process

Each project is unique, so my process differs as well. The illustration presents the standard process that is followed by my team but let’s see how did it go for this particular project:

Discover - this step covers the user research part where we observed the behavior of the user to get a clear idea of what are the challenges that they face with the current implementation and the part where we interview the stakeholders to get a better understanding of the business needs.

Define - at this step we researched our competitors to understand the market and we analyzed the materials gathered during the discovery phase to come up with a list of key findings and requirements.

Ideate - with a clear problem statement, the team gets together and discusses all the ideas and potential solutions.

Prototype - This is a very important step that starts with the diagram flow, and the low fidelity prototypes, and ends up with the final high fidelity designs. At the final steps, the designs are discussed with the rest of the team in order to gather feedback and improve.

Test - In order to make sure that the design is functional and clear for the final user we performed a semi-structured usability test.

Deliver - Create the deliverables for the engineering team; support them through the development with additional information.

Dedicated report for the admin

The solution that we came up with was to create a dedicated report where the administrator can see at a glimpse where their company stands in terms of cyber readiness and how to improve it. Some of the things that were considered while working on this project:

• The report is not addressed to experts in this field. We strive to create a product that is accessible to anyone, no matter their education on the topic. We do that by explaining all of the concepts that are presented and their impact on the company.

• Make sure that the user can download the report. How old-fashioned that might sound, in some companies this is how things work - you need to present a printed report that presents the progress of your actions. Because of that, we want to support our users and we added the functionality to download the report and we designed a print-friendly.

• Have a clear distinction for the functionalities that are not active. The better protected you are, the lower risks your company is facing. We want to encourage the admin to enforce all of the protections, make sure that all of the employees use their Paladin extension, and that all of the training has been completed.

Solution breakdown

The report starts with the general Cyber readiness score that will be detailed in the report. We associate color and a risk level to this score so that the user can understand what exactly does it mean. Next to it, we present a list of actions that the user can take in order to improve that score. We wanted to make the feature enable very easy so by pressing the button, the feature is enabled.

What happens when all of the features are enabled? What will the “Improve readiness” section look like in that case? That section will never be empty - we added some general tips for the admin on what should be done outside of the system to keep their company secure.

The next section presents high-level information regarding the actions of the employees. There is no point if all of the features in the toolkit are enabled by the admin if the team does not use them.  That is why, here the admin can see an overview of the number of the users that are using the Browser protection, Inbox protection, and the number of users that performed risky actions.

You can notice that the stats present the change that took place since the last month - the admin can see if there has been an evolution 👍 or a regression 👎  and act accordingly.

The report continues with a detailed component of each one of the items that contribute to the general score. Let’s take a look at these widgets:

Training completion: “Employee behavior is your #1 Cyber Threat” is the motto of our cyber university efforts. Having informed employees that know how to act in risky situations is essential. You can help your team acquire these skills by requiring them to study the Cyber Awareness Training that we provide. From this widget, the admin can see what training is required, and what is the completion rate and they can deep down even further to see what are the employees that did not complete their training. The admin also has the possibility to send reminders to the employees to inform them regarding the task in hand.

The widget has a distinct state for the case in which that training is not available for the employees.

Another component present in the report is the phishing simulation results. The employees of the company are tested with phishing emails and the admin can see the overview of the results and go into more detail to identify the users that committed these mistakes and need more training.

For the case in which the feature is disabled, we have a special visual treatment that calls the attention of the admin. Also, additional details are being provided on why is this needed and how will that help the company in regards to their security.

There are some exceptions among the employees where nothing else can be done on the platform to help them so the admin needs to intervene offline- for example, employees that keep failing phishing tests definitely need additional help.  We want to help the admins prepare for the discussions so we provide them concrete examples with explanations that they can use in these additional training sessions.

The results

After implementing the report in the product, we saw an improvement in regards to the time interacted with the platform from the admin side. A considerable number of users after receiving their monthly email reminding them about the report would open the platform and study the results. Besides that, we saw an increase in the reminders sent to the employees and the completion rate for the training, and the usage of the tools offered.