Merging Policy and Practice: Crafting Effective Social Engineering
Awareness-Raising Policies
Eliana Stavrou
1a
, Andriani Piki
2b
and Panayiotis Varnava
2
1
Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, Open University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
2
School of Sciences, University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, Pyla, Cyprus
Keywords: Cybersecurity, Cybersecurity Policy Design, Social Engineering, Cybersecurity Awareness, Upskilling.
Abstract: Cybersecurity policies play a fundamental role in fostering organizational cyber governance and cyber
resilience. Cybersecurity awareness-raising and training policies specify upskilling requirements and
explicitly address persistent threats such as social engineering attacks. While cybersecurity awareness-raising
and training activities complement the objectives of security policies, challenges including stakeholder
diversity, budget constraints, generic messaging and low user engagement hinder their effectiveness. For
successful policy adoption it is crucial for the workforce to grasp the relevance of these policies within their
work context, understand how social engineering attacks are deployed, and apply policy rules appropriately.
However, existing awareness-raising and training policies often lack specificity, leading to gaps in employee
engagement and behavioural change, especially regarding social engineering threats. To address these issues,
the paper proposes a dedicated social engineering awareness-raising policy, guided by Merrill's Principles of
Instructions. This work aims to merge policy and practice, offering tailored examples of social engineering
attacks, explicitly connecting them to relevant cybersecurity policies and making the content more engaging
and relevant to the workforce. This is envisioned as a cost-effective resource for organizations with a limited
training budget, which can be utilized as a starting point to enhance employee awareness, engagement, and
foster a stronger organizational cyber resilience culture.
1 INTRODUCTION
Cyber security policies are a core element of a cyber
security strategy, contributing towards an effective
organizational cyber security governance (ISO/IEC,
2022). Many organizations develop a cyber security
awareness-raising and training policy as part of their
cyber security governance (CIS, 2023). This policy
sets the requirements and focus of the training that
should be undertaken by the organization. The
policy’s content is often written at a high level,
specifying that the workforce should be made aware
of the organization’s cyber security policies, typical
cyber threats, and best practices to address them.
While this document sets the overall strategy in terms
of awareness and training aspects, it does not assist
for example the IT team to tailor the training
according to employees’ roles and responsibilities
which can contribute towards more effective
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4040-4942
b
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0376-1713
behaviour change and cyber hygiene. Currently, an
awareness-raising and training policy does not
include relevant content to help the IT team to map
cyber threats to the different cyber security policies
of the organization and effectively communicate this
mapping to the organization’s workforce. Mapping
cyber threats to specific cyber security policies could
contribute to raising awareness on the problem
(Stavrou, 2020) and, in turn, understanding and
accepting the actions to be deployed. This can lead to
more effective upskilling and to the development of a
cyber security culture across an organization.
A major cyber threat that organizations continue
facing is social engineering (SE). The digital
transformation that occurred during COVID-19
pandemic provided a great opportunity to cyber
criminals (Venkatesha et al., 2021) to attack
organizations and/or individuals through SE.
Awareness-raising and training have been proved to
Stavrou, E., Piki, A. and Varnava, P.
Merging Policy and Practice: Crafting Effective Social Engineering Awareness-Raising Policies.
DOI: 10.5220/0012410300003648
Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP 2024), pages 179-186
ISBN: 978-989-758-683-5; ISSN: 2184-4356
Proceedings Copyright © 2024 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda.
179
complement the objectives of security policies and to
be the most effective way to address SE attacks
(Smith et al., 2013). However, several challenges
exist that can hinder the adoption of upskilling
solutions, with the economic factor being the most
prevailing challenge (GOV.UK, 2023). The impact
from a SE attack can be devastating for an
organization, especially when this attack is launched
as the starting point for delivering more advanced
attacks, such as ransomware. This should prompt the
cybersecurity community to design new interventions
and increase cyber resilience against SE attacks. As
indicated in ENISA’s latest Cyber Security Threat
Landscape 2023 (ENISA, 2023), the problem remains
and efforts should continue to empower organizations
becoming cyber resilient against this type of attacks.
Another challenge that is identified across the
provision of different SE training and awareness
programs (Aldawood & Skinner, 2019) is that often
the same message or content is communicated across
different audiences. This approach does not help the
workforce to relate to the problem, realize the threat
and how it can be transformed in their work context
(Stavrou, 2020). This lack of contextualised
understanding can hinder employees’ engagement
with awareness-raising efforts and the motivation to
change their behaviour.
There is a timely and critical need to return to the
basics and reconsider the design of awareness-raising
policies, by developing a dedicated and
contextualizable SE awareness-raising policy. Such a
policy can provide tailored examples of SE attacks
and link them to relevant policies. Organizations that
do not currently have the budget to allocate for
external training can utilize the policy to educate their
employees and better prepare them for follow up
awareness-raising and training sessions that can be
scheduled as soon as the budget permits. Overall, the
aim of creating a dedicated SE awareness-raising
policy is twofold: first, to create more engaging,
demonstrative, and relevant content to the
organization so that the workforce can easily relate to
the security policies’ content and be motivated to
apply it in practice (hence merging policy
enforcement with practical application); and second
to serve as a reference point to design purposefully
tailored awareness-raising and training sessions. This
work investigates the use of Merrill’s Principles of
Instructions (MPI) to support the proposed policy
design objectives. Moreover, a questionnaire is being
developed to assess policy-related aspects with the
aim to inform policy design.
The paper is structured as follows: section 2
presents the methodology; section 3 briefly discusses
related work; sections 4 and 5 discuss how MPI can
be utilized and the key aspects that can inform the
design of a SE awareness-raising policy, respectively.
Section 6 presents the proposed policy design and
some preliminary evaluation results. Finally, section
7 concludes the work performed in this study.
2 METHODOLOGY
Initially, research was performed to identify and
analyse standards and frameworks related to design
aspects of information security policies. The
objective was to identify the typical structure and
content of security policies. Through the
investigation, it was also important to identify
specific security policies that can be applied in the
context of a variety of SE attacks. Moreover,
Merrill’s Principles of Instruction were analysed to
explore how this model can potentially guide the
design of an engaging and effective SE awareness-
raising policy. Another aspect that could inform the
design of such a policy relates to the workforce’s
perceptions regarding different policy-related aspects
that might contribute to a false sense of security. A
questionnaire was developed to assess these aspects.
The questionnaire was administered in the context of
a small organisation with a limited training budget.
Investigation results informed the design of a novel
SE awareness-raising policy. An initial evaluation
with a follow-up questionnaire was performed to
assess the design principles of the proposed policy.
3 RELATED WORK
Different frameworks, standards and guidelines exist
to guide the design of cyber security policies. The
purpose of security policies is twofold. On one hand
to guide the general workforce of an organization on
the best practices that should be followed, the actions
that are not endorsed, and guide them to report
incidents to the organization. On the other hand, to
guide the technical team to implement appropriate
technologies and procedures to comply with the
security policies.
The ISO/IEC 27002:2022 standard (ISO/IEC,
2022) provides guidelines to organizations, to
determine and implement commonly accepted
information security controls as part of an
information security management system (ISMS).
Usually, an organization defines a high-level
information security policy to set the approach to
ICISSP 2024 - 10th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
180
manage its information security. This policy is then
supported by a bundle of other topic-specific policies
to guide the implementation and applicability of other
controls. Examples include, among others, email
policy, backup policy, information classification and
handling, acceptable use policy, etc. Some of these
policies are applicable by the general workforce of
the organization while others are meant to be
considered by the technical team.
ISO/IEC 27002:2022 standard includes two
specific controls that are relevant to upskilling the
workforce. Control 5.27 “Learning from information
security incidents” aims to reduce the likelihood or
consequences of future incidents. The control
mandates that knowledge gained from security
incidents should be used to strengthen and improve
security controls, including enhancing “User
awareness and training” (control 6.3). As per control
5.27, this can be achieved by “providing examples of
what can happen, how to respond to such incidents
and how to avoid them in the future”. This approach
indicates that awareness and training should be
tailored to reflect the threats that are relevant to the
organization’s business environment and operations.
With regards to the user awareness and training
control, the standard specifies that employees should
be made aware of the security policies and be trained,
considering their job function. Such educational
activities should be scheduled regularly to help
employees learn and retain the knowledge gained. In
essence, this approach should adopt a micro-training
plan (Kävrestad, 2023) to maximize the benefits of
upskilling initiatives. Moreover, it is highlighted that
it is essential to not only focus on the ‘what’ and
‘how’, but also the ‘why’ so employees realize the
problem, its impact and the objective of the controls
that should be applied.
The Cyber Security Framework (CSF) proposed
by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST, 2018) is another framework that guides
organizations to manage cybersecurity risks by
applying a set of best practices. The framework
assembles guidelines and practices under five
cybersecurity functions (identify, protect, detect,
respond, recover), providing a holistic approach and
empowering organizations to improve their cyber
resilience. The framework can be utilized by
organizations as a tool to align policy, business, and
technological approaches to managing cybersecurity
risks. Different policy templates, (e.g., CIS & MS-
ISAC, 2019a, 2019b; Healthit.gov, 2018; SANS,
2022) have been developed to assist organizations
apply the CSF.
With regards to SE attacks, Alharthi & Regan
(2021) have proposed a model of SE ‘infosec
policies and designed a survey to measure their
adoption level. The policies are categorised under
four areas (people, data, hardware and software, and
network) that can be impacted by SE attacks. The
proposed policies target both end-users and IT teams.
The latter are expected to implement the relevant
policies’ rules. Aldawood (2020) emphasizes that it is
essential to understand people’s behaviour and prior
knowledge to provide them with customized and
effective SE security training. The author proposes to
group people based on their awareness of SE threats
prior to providing tailored security training.
Steinmetz et al. (2023) interviewed social engineers
and IT professionals about their perceptions related to
different aspects of security policies. Results
highlighted the need to consider the elements that
make for an effective policy document; the way it is
written and communicated, and the supporting
mechanisms to aid its implementation.
4 SECURITY POLICY DESIGN
POWERED BY
INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN
PRINCIPLES
4.1 Merrill's Principles of Instruction
This paper explores the applicability of the MPI
model (Merrill, 2002) in guiding the design of
engaging and effective security policies. The MPI
model consists of five interrelated principles that can
effectively promote learning:
̵ Problem-Centred. Learning can be more
effective when knowledge is acquired in the
context of real-life tasks or problems.
̵ Activation. Learning activities should help
learners to activate prior knowledge and to
process and structure the new knowledge to
make associations between the past and the new
knowledge.
̵ Demonstration. Learners can retain knowledge
longer when real tasks or problems are
demonstrated.
̵ Application. Learners can build new knowledge
and skills effectively when they carry out real
tasks or investigate real problems.
̵ Integration. The learning activities should
encourage the learners to integrate the new
Merging Policy and Practice: Crafting Effective Social Engineering Awareness-Raising Policies
181
knowledge they have acquired into their
professional and/or personal environment.
The work by Charalambous & Stavrou (2023) has
demonstrated how MPI can be used to design SE
awareness-raising and training activities that support
the key objective of a culture of cyber situational
awareness, e.g. enabling people to recognise when
they are being attacked in a professional and/or
personal context, understanding the means of attack
and the bad practices to avoid, and recognising the
measures to counter SE attacks. This paper extends
the work proposed by Charalambous and Stavrou
(2023) by providing guidelines on how MPI can drive
the design of effective SE awareness-raising policies.
4.2 Guidelines Towards Designing
Effective Social Engineering
Awareness-Raising Policies
Given that crafting a novel SE awareness-raising
policy, which is envisioned to encompass educational
content for raising security awareness while being
packaged as a policy programme, it is essential to first
investigate typical policy designs, how they are
structured and what content needs to be included.
Such an investigation can provide insights regarding
gaps that need to be addressed to support the design
of a SE awareness-raising policy.
4.2.1 Design Limitations of Security Policies
Security policies usually provide a set of statements
covering what employees can or cannot do, actions to
take in case of an incident and the procedures to verify
compliance with the policy. Different types of
security policies (e.g., Alharthi & Regan, 2021; CIS
& MS-ISAC, 2019a, 2019b; Healthit.gov, 2018;
ISO/IEC, 2022; SANS, 2022) can address the threat
of SE attacks. From the investigations performed, a
set of security policies was identified pertinent to:
emails, passwords, internet usage, encryption, social
media and internet postings, acceptable use, data
classification, clean desk, access control, removable
media, anti-malware tools, security event reporting,
communications management, and software
installation. Usually, these policies include
statements relevant to the respective topic but do not
provide a reference to the relevant SE attack(s). Also,
as per the recommended guidelines (e.g., ISO/IEC,
2022; Steinmetz et al., 2023), the policy statements
should be brief, concise, and clear. While this is an
important aspect, these statements are usually generic
rather than contextualized in the working
environment of the workforce.
4.2.2 Human-Centred Security Policy
Design
Considering the MPI model, a SE awareness-raising
policy should adopt a human-centred approach. Such
a policy should contextualize the problem within the
specific industry the workforce is employed, in line
with Problem-centred principle of MPI. This means
that policy statements should not be generic but
tailored to an organization’s scope of work and
aligned to the workforce’s job responsibilities.
Employees could better comprehend the policy when
this is relevant to their working environment.
The structure and presentation of the policy can
also play a significant role in helping people
understand and relate with the policy’s content.
Arbitrary policy statements could not help people
easily activate prior knowledge and experiences
related to SE attacks. Following the Activation
principle of MPI and informing employees in a
structured approach on how SE attacks work in real
life, could help activate prior knowledge and relate
with the problem and the policy content. This aspect
can be further enhanced through the MPI
Demonstration principle. Storytelling scenarios could
be utilized to present SE attacks that are relevant to
the business environment and tasks. This can further
contribute to better understanding the problem as
employees can relate SE attacks with their work. A
logical scenario sequence could be to name the
attacks, outline the attack means, and then present
short scenarios elaborating the lures, techniques, and
impact, with a direct link to the policy statements and
the expected response actions. These scenarios should
be further tailored to cover different job roles. A
diagrammatic format (e.g., using flow charts, tables,
etc.) could aid the presentation of these scenarios. The
proposed approach could make policy content more
relevant to employees, aid their understanding,
motivate them to accept and comply with policies,
promoting an organizational culture of cyber
situational awareness.
Organizations can consider the Application
principle of the MPI model to confirm whether
employees understood the problem, can adapt their
knowledge in new situations and apply the policy
accordingly. This can be achieved by presenting new
attack scenarios to employees in the context of their
work towards enhancing and assessing their
knowledge and skills. Results can indicate whether
further guidance and training are needed. Of course,
the ultimate assessment would be in real conditions,
considering MPI Integration principle. Lessons
learned could inform policies’ updates, and this
ICISSP 2024 - 10th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
182
should be a continuous process, contributing towards
an effective cybersecurity governance.
5 ASSESSING THE
WORKFORCE’S SENSE OF
SECURITY
A key challenge organizations face with regards to
information security policies is the false sense of
security (Stavrou, 2020) their workforce might
display. Ignorance or lack of awareness can put an
organization at immense risk as its employees may not
consider the importance of applying policies, thinking
that they are secure ‘by default’. In this work, we
deemed important to assess whether the employees: 1)
knew if the organization applied security policies, 2)
were aware whether the organization was applying
security measures against cyber threats, 3) were
familiar with a variety of SE attacks, 4) were
implementing bad practices, and 5) recognized the
need for continuous education about cyber threats.
Results can provide insights to the organization on the
extent that employees are feeling a false sense of
security which can pose a great threat to the
organization. If such a case occurs, the organization
needs to take actions to increase awareness and training
of employees to rectify the situation.
An assessment was performed in the context of a
small organization which did not have any security
policies in place. Forty four (n=44) employees
responded to the questionnaire we administered with
the objective to investigate their security awareness
level and provide insights to design the organization’s
security policies. Initially, the emphasis was on the
design of a SE awareness-raising policy.
The questionnaire first investigated whether
employees had knowledge of the organization’s
security policies. The majority of employees (96%)
responded that their organization has applied security
policies. In reality, the organization did not have any
security policies. Security policies are a core element
of a cybersecurity strategy that guide the general
workforce to protect the assets of an organization.
Therefore, it is crucial for an organization to have a
clear view of the employees’ awareness level and
their perception regarding implemented security
measures. The result alerted the organization that
realized that its workforce was having a false sense of
security.
What is more alarming, was the employees
perception of implemented measures against SE
attacks. Approximately half of the participants (52%)
reported they do not know the measures taken by the
organization. Although this is acceptable as the
organization did not implement something specific, the
majority of the employees were certain that security
policies were in place to protect the organization,
including policies related to SE attacks. Another 16%
reported that there are measures implemented,
contributing to an elevated false sense of security
across the organization’s workforce. The rest of the
participants (32%) reported that they do not actually
know if measures are taken by the organization.
Figure 1: Investigating familiarity with SE attacks.
It was also important to assess employees’ awareness
level related to SE attacks. The organization did not
offer any specific training related to SE attacks. A
high percentage of employees (87%) reported that
they did not participate in any training in the past.
Only a small cohort (13%) reported attending such a
training, probably in the context of their previous
employment. Even though employees did not
undertake a formal training, it was assumed that some
of them may be familiar with different types of SE
attacks, e.g., due to personal experience, awareness
campaigns on social media, etc. As indicated in
Figure 1, employees were mostly familiar with email
phishing attacks and attacks delivered through social
networks. Employees seem to be less aware of
physical-related SE attacks such as dumpster diving,
tailgating, etc. Moreover, it was significant that the
assessment indicated that most employees were not
familiar with vishing, an attack which is often utilized
by cyber criminals.
Moreover, the questionnaire assessed whether bad
practices are applied. Specifically, it was of interest
to the organization to investigate whether the physical
security could be easily compromised. This was
indicated by the positive response of 37% of
participants who declared that they share their access
card with colleagues. This indicates that they do not
realize the risk of physical security compromisation,
which is a typical SE attack scenario (tailgating).
Merging Policy and Practice: Crafting Effective Social Engineering Awareness-Raising Policies
183
Table 1: Proposed social engineering awareness-raising policy.
A critical aspect related to mitigating a false sense
of security, concerns the perception of employees
related to the need for continuous education (Stavrou,
2023) about cyber threats. This aspect can be assessed
through their perception about the awareness-raising
and training frequency. A high percentage of
participants (57%) reported that awareness-raising
initiatives should occur once a year, about one in
three (27%) indicated twice a year, and 16%
answered just once. These results indicate that many
employees may not realize the importance of life-long
learning and continuous professional development
(CPD) for staying up to date with the cyber threat
landscape and the cyber hygiene practices that should
be applied to protect themselves and their
organization. Thus, it becomes imperative for
organizations to take actions to help their workforce
realize the importance of life-long learning and
cultivate relevant skills using engaging learning
methods (Piki et al., 2023).
6 PROPOSED SOCIAL
ENGINEERING
AWARENESS-RAISING
POLICY
Typically, an organization should have several
security policies as part of an information security
management system (ISMS). At the top of the
hierarchy lies the enterprise security policy that sets
the overall security objectives at a strategic level. This
endeavour is supported by a set of other policies,
covering different areas that are important to the
organisation. These are called topic-specific policies.
Moreover, system-specific policies can be specified
to focus on a particular type of system, e.g., a firewall.
This structure fits well with the purpose of the
proposed SE awareness-raising policy which is linked
to attack-specific security policies. The proposed
policy will specify the SE attacks that are relevant to
the business environment of the organization and
which the workforce should be made aware of. In
turn, the workforce is expected to demonstrate the
ability to identify, protect, detect, respond, and
recover from such attacks, in accordance to the CSF.
Considering ISO/IEC Control 5.27 “Learning
from information security incident” and Control 6.3
“User awareness and training”, a new SE awareness-
raising policy is proposed with two key design
aspects that reflect the key guidelines provided by the
controls as discussed above, in the Related Work
section. One key design aspect focuses on the need to
make the workforce aware of the different types of SE
attacks, the techniques utilized to deploy such attacks,
and the actions that should be taken to detect and
respond to these attacks. The actions relate to the
rules that the workforce needs to follow, and which
can be listed across different security policies. This
can be made evident to the workforce by mapping SE
attacks to the relevant security policies implemented
ICISSP 2024 - 10th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
184
by the organization. The aim is to empower
employees to demonstrate resilience against
malicious attempts that are elusively trying to collect
sensitive information through various techniques to
compromise the organization’s infrastructure and
impact its operations. Table 1 provides a potential list
of SE attacks that can be relevant to an organization’s
business operation and indicates the means that can
be utilized in each case. Appropriate attack scenarios
can be provided in Appendices, demonstrating how
these attacks can be implemented in an organization’s
context. The work performed by Charalambous and
Stavrou (2023) provides guidelines on how to
contextualize SE attacks in a healthcare ecosystem.
The second key design aspect relates to the
provision of SE awareness-raising and the practices
that the organization should implement. This is
elaborated taking into consideration that small
businesses might not have the budget to purchase
third party training services. The lack of a security
training budget does not mean that a business should
not consider other cost-efficient actions, fortifying
their workforce against SE attacks. This challenge is
also highlighted in CIIS (2023) where respondents
indicated that “those most at risk are people and
organisations that do not have the resources to protect
themselves […] What it all shows is that protecting
against the economic impact on security is a societal
challenge. Like vaccination, the more people and
businesses that are protected, the less opportunity
there is for threats to breed or break out”. Therefore,
two SE awareness-raising levels are proposed to
accommodate different situations when security
budgets are limited and until resources are availble.
The provided guidelines are envisioned to enhance
the guidelines provided under ISO/IEC 27002:2022
Control 6.3 – User awareness and training.
Appropriate policy rules are expected to be spawned
from this work’s guidelines.
Level 1 – Directed Reading Activity. The
IT/Security officer of the organisation should provide
to employees an attack scenario from Table 1 and the
related security policies. Employees are expected to
read the attack scenarios to realize how a SE attack
might be deployed in the context of their working
environment. This is expected to help employees
associate the policy rules with the problem and
understand the benefit from applying them. Given
that there are different examples of SE attacks that
employees should understand, it is recommended to
have weekly reading activities so that people have the
time to relate to each case, process the provided
information and increase the chance to retain the
developed knowledge. Following the completion of
the reading activities, the IT/Security officer should
launch brief assessments to confirm that employees
can acknowledge which security policies are relevant
to specific SE attacks. These can be in the form of
quizzes or may embrace digital game-based learning
approaches as proposed in Piki et al. (2023).
Level 2 – Development of Tailored Awareness -
Raising and Training Activities and Material. This
level should also take into consideration the attack
scenarios and security policies provided in Table 1 to
create engaging and effective awareness raising
activities. The activities might be developed in-house
(if there is expertise) or externally when there is a
budget available. Moreover, the initial attack
examples can be further tailored to specific
departments and job roles to help people understand
how attacks can be transformed given different
business contexts.
An initial policy document was developed
considering the proposed guidelines. The policy was
delivered in a small company as part of a SE
awareness-raising program. Following the
awareness-raising activity (policy distribution across
the workforce), a preliminary evaluation was
performed to assess the key design aspect of the
proposed policy – the tailored attack scenarios.
Through a questionnaire all employees
acknowledged that they better understood the policies
through the provided real-life attack examples.
Providing real-life attack examples in a security
policy can help people to better understand the
situation, compared to the case of just providing an
attack definition. Various attack scenarios where also
presented to the employees, receiving promising
results which indicated that a high percentage (75%)
of the workforce was able to recognize the attacks and
to identify where to report the potential incidents.
Evidently, the proposed intervention is considered an
initial step towards increasing awareness on SE
attacks and relevant policies implemented by an
organization. It should serve as a complementary
measure along with other interventions to contribute
towards a workforce with solid cyber resilient
capabilities against SE attacks.
7 CONCLUSIONS
The workforce’s acceptance and adherence to
cybersecurity policies is a critical factor that can
contribute towards an effective organizational cyber
Merging Policy and Practice: Crafting Effective Social Engineering Awareness-Raising Policies
185
security governance. Organizations should consider
different interventions to assist the workforce realize
the nature of cyber threats, how attacks are delivered,
the impact to individual safety and business
operations, recognize what behaviours can put the
organization at risk and what actions they need to
apply when they are under attack. A common cyber
threat that organizations and individuals are facing is
SE. A typical approach to address SE attacks is to
deliver awareness-raising training to empower and
upskill the workforce. However, this should not be
perceived as a solution that can be adopted by all
organizations as this depends on different factors,
with the economic aspect and lack of engagement
being the most prevailing. Given that awareness-
raising and training activities can complement the
objectives of security policies, this should be taken
into account to propose new interventions to
empower small businesses that have limited budgets
to increase awareness of their workforce. This work
proposes the development of a social engineering
awareness-raising policy, incorporating awareness-
raising and educational principles alongside policy
rules. The aim is to offer an open, cost-free baseline
intervention that can help the workforce realize how
SE attacks can be delivered in the context of their
working environment and job role, better understand
the objectives of specific security policies, identify
and apply the relevant policy rules that can help in
addressing SE attacks. Future work will expand upon
the concept of delivering tailored SE awareness-
raising and training initiatives.
REFERENCES
Aldawood, H., Skinner, G. (2019). Reviewing Cyber
Security Social Engineering Training and Awareness
Programs—Pitfalls and Ongoing Issues, Future
Internet, vol. 11, no. 3, p. 73.
Aldawood, H. (2020). A Policy Framework to Prevent
Social Engineering, 3rd International Conference
Middle East and North Africa Conference of
Information System, Casablanca, Moroco.
Alharthi, D., Regan, A. (2021). A Literature Survey and
Analysis on Social Engineering Defense Mechanisms
and INFOSEC Policies, Int. Journal of Network
Security & Its Applications (IJNSA) Vol.13, No.2.
Charalambous, A., Stavrou, E. (2023). Building societal
resilience against social engineering attacks:
Unleashing the power of instructional design and
microtargeting, 16th Annual International Conference
of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI).
CIS, MS-ISAC. (2019a). NIST Cybersecurity Framework,
SANS Policy Templates.
CIS, MS-ISAC. (2019b). NIST Cybersecurity Framework,
Policy Template Guide.
CIS. (2023). Security Awareness Skills Training Policy
Template, CIS Critical Security Controls.
https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/white-
papers/security-awareness-skills-training-policy-
template-for-cis-control-14. (Accessed on 28/10/2023)
CIIS. (2023). Chartered Institute of Information Security -
The Security Profession 2022/23.
ENISA. (2023). ENISA Threat Landscape 2023.
https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/enisa-threat-
landscape-2023. (Accessed on 28/10/2023)
GOV.UK. (2023) Cyber security skills in the UK labour
market 2023.
Healthit.gov. (2018). Info Security Policy Template.
https://www.healthit.gov/resource/information-
security-policy-template. (Accessed on 28/10/2023)
ISO/IEC. (2022). ISO/IEC 27002:2022 Information
security, cybersecurity and privacy protection:
Information security controls
Kävrestad, J., Furnell, S., Nohlberg, M. (2023). User
perception of Context-Based Micro-Training – a
method for cybersecurity training, Information Security
Journal: A Global Perspective
Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instructional
design, Educational Technology Research and
Development, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 43–59.
NIST. (2018). Framework for Improving Critical
Infrastructure Cybersecurity
Piki, A., Stavrou, E., Procopiou, A., Demosthenous, A.
(2023). Fostering Cybersecurity Awareness and Skills
Development Through Digital Game-Based Learning,
10th International Conference on Behavioural and
Social Computing (BESC)
SANS (2022). SANS Security Policy Templates.
https://www.sans.org/information-security-policy.
(Accessed on 28/10/2023)
Smith, A., Papadaki, M., Furnell, S. M. (2013). Improving
awareness of social engineering attacks, IFIP Advances
in Information and Communication Technology, vol.
406, pp. 249-256.
Stavrou, E. (2020). Back to basics: Towards building
societal resilience against a cyber pandemic, Journal on
Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (JSCI), vol. 18,
no. 7, pp. 73-80.
Stavrou, E. (2023). Planning for Professional Development
in Cybersecurity: A New Curriculum Design.
International Symposium on Human Aspects of
Information Security and Assurance (HAISA), UK.
Steinmetz, K.F., Holt, T.J. Brewer, C.G. (2023).
Developing and implementing social engineering-
prevention policies: a qualitative study. Security
Journal.
Venkatesha, S., Reddy, K.R., Chandavarkar, B.R. (2021).
Social Engineering Attacks During the COVID-19
Pandemic. SN Computer Science, vol. 2, no. 78.
ICISSP 2024 - 10th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
186