Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Jack Koziol, CEO and Founder of Infosec:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Infosec provides role-guided cybersecurity education for the entire organization — from the accounting department to the SOC team. We help IT and security professionals advance their careers with skills development and certifications while empowering all employees with security awareness and privacy training to stay cyber-safe at work and home.
The story of Infosec started shortly after I published The Shellcoder’s Handbook. The book’s popularity drove needed interest and awareness of ethical hacking and software vulnerabilities — a new and taboo topic at the time. The book led to multiple requests to teach boot camps on the software exploits covered in the book. After using all of my vacation time teaching courses, I quit my day job as the sole security personnel at a large bank and spent the next couple of years traveling around the world teaching people with corporate jobs how to hack.
This led to the founding of Infosec in 2004. Taking my learnings from teaching cyber professionals in the field, the Infosec team reinvented how cybersecurity education software looked. We developed Infosec Skills and Infosec IQ to meet this demand, helping organizations scale effective, role-guided cyber education to every employee.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: With online shopping fraud doubling in the first half of 2021 and nearly 90% of U.S. consumers planning to shop online this season, cybercrime and holiday scams are expected to reach record highs this year. We’ve found that the best way to prevent these types of attacks is by educating people on how to detect and avoid them, and by giving security professionals the tools to outsmart cybercriminals. As a leading provider of cybersecurity education training, we feel our role is to make this information engaging and accessible.
To help organizations and consumers avoid these cyber holiday risks, Infosec is providing free resources, including a comprehensive security awareness and training kit, an ethical hacking training webinar for security professionals and a hands-on cyber skills challenge hosted in Infosec Skills for current and aspiring cyber professionals.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: The Infosec Skills and Infosec IQ platforms provide hands-on, engaging training to the entire enterprise, empowering employees with the knowledge, skills and confidence to outsmart cybercrime.
Infosec Skills enables organizations to upskill and certify cyber teams with over 1,200 role-based courses, hands-on cyber ranges and labs. Learners progress from beginner to expert with training mapped to in-demand cyber roles like SOC analyst and cloud security engineer, as well as industry standards like the NICE Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity and MITRE ATT&CK® Matrix. Interactive cyber ranges go one step further to move learners from theory to practice through guided, realistic labs with clear learning objectives and actionable lessons.
Infosec IQ security awareness and training empowers employees with the knowledge and skills to stay cyber-secure at work and home. With over 2,000 awareness and training resources, clients have everything they need to prepare employees to detect, report and defeat cybercrime. Every aspect of the platform can be customized and personalized to match an organization’s culture and employees’ learning styles.
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: Looking ahead, Infosec is continuing our focus on developing products that make cybersecurity education more accessible and engaging to keep pace with this quickly evolving industry.
This will involve continuing our investment into the Infosec Skills hands-on cyber ranges and launching a new role-guided training program mapped to the ten most in-demand security roles.
Infosec will also be launching a new security awareness series produced by our award-winning content team and new features in Infosec IQ that will provide additional gamified experiences to learners.
Finally, we’re excited to expand our Infosec Gives initiative with a new scholarship partner program recently launched with the Women’s Society of Cyberjutstu, with more partners joining us in 2022.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Infosec started in the cybersecurity boot camp space 17 years ago and has since ltaken lessons learned from every step of our journey and put them into the platforms we have today. Notably, moving from checking the ‘training box’ to teaching skills in an engaging way that allows students to leave with real-world skills they can immediately apply at work and home.
For technical training, we use a combination of immersive lectures and hands-on labs in the cyber ranges to help students learn by doing and gain valuable skills. To give learners more options for hands-on technical training, we launched our new Infosec Skills cyber ranges this year. Alongside the launch of our cyber ranges, we established the Infosec Skills Monthly Challenge for any cybersecurity enthusiast or professional to learn new skills each month — for free.
On the security awareness and training side, our newly released Choose Your Own Adventure® Security Awareness Games have transformed how our clients deliver security awareness and training to their employees. We partnered with the team behind the Choose Your Own Adventure® brand to bring the excitement and mystery of the popular gamebook series to security awareness and training programs across the world. The games put learners in charge of their own security awareness training program with interactive storylines that encourage critical thinking and decision making — while keeping training fun.
Last Updated on February 26, 2022
