How Shelter Insurance Builds Cyber Resilience with Vyond

After Vyond training, clicks on email phishing links dropped by 50%.

About Shelter Insurance

Launched in 1946, Shelter Insurance is a Missouri-based U.S. property casualty insurance company operating in 21 states.

Industry

Financial Services

Employees

2,000+

Challenge

Recently, the information security team at Shelter Insurance realized they needed a new, more engaging way to help their employees, agents, and board members protect themselves, and the company, from increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks.

Given bad actors’ rapid pace of developing new tools and methods, Information Security Analyst Melissa Camper was concerned about the short shelf life of cybersecurity training. Melissa was also looking for a way to move away from simple compliance — a purely “check the box” exercise — and toward a fresher, more dynamic approach to engage and educate learners.

When Melissa came to eLearning Designer Linda Winn to find a new approach, Linda had an idea: Vyond videos.

Linda had recently brought in Vyond to create a prep video for an executive presentation skills course, and she said it spread “like wildfire.” Stakeholders liked the animated style and shorter, scenario-based learning approach. Business partners were asking, “how’d you do that? Could you do that for my project?”

Based on the video’s success and widespread popularity, Linda thought Vyond would be a great option for this cybersecurity project as well.

Approach

Linda and Melissa partnered with Linda’s teammate, fellow eLearning Designer Craig Gladney, to come up with their concept: an ongoing series, “Crash of the Titan,” about the evolving cybersecurity challenges that crop up at a parody insurance company, Titan, and how employees do — and should — respond. Scenarios included the many ways Titan’s data and information systems could be at risk — like phishing and social engineering — and the important role employees play in protecting them.

“Using Vyond to create scenario-based training has allowed us to expand understanding and responsibility to everyone in the company,” says Linda. “Our employees understand that cybersecurity and protecting the company is everyone’s responsibility.”

The first “season” for the series included five videos, released a week apart. And the program was so effective at both engagement and education, “Crash of the Titan” is now in its fourth season.

How Vyond helped

To measure their training’s effectiveness, the information security team sends a phishing simulation “pre-test” to their 5,000 employees, agents, and board members to benchmark how many click on a fake “bad link.” Then the team releases new cyber awareness training. Sometime later, they send another phishing simulation and compare results to the pre-test.

After the Vyond training, Linda says there’s been a 28% increase in the number of stakeholders who could recognize and thwart simulated phishing attempts. More importantly, the simulations show there has been a 50% decrease in the number of clicks on “live” phish, despite the exponential increase in phishing emails attempting to penetrate the company’s system.

As an added bonus, based on the steady positive feedback the team gets, audiences seem to actually enjoy the series.

Beyond “Crash of the Titan,” Linda, Craig, and the team continue to find new ways to use Vyond – like policy-related training for agents that was previously “long and boring.”

“We feel we’ve been able to up our game as far as people really enjoying training, being engaged, and learning,” Linda says. Craig adds, “We’ve found Vyond works well for both the conceptual and the really specific things. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to use what the tool does well.” And Vyond’s ease of use means the team can be agile as new training needs emerge — like with cybersecurity.

“You end up with new phishing techniques based on whatever’s going on in society,” Craig says. “So we tell our business partners: If something comes in, let us know — we can turn around something specific pretty quickly.”

Melissa is thrilled with the approach that Vyond has made possible for cybersecurity training: “We’re able to deliver training now that’s highly relevant to what is happening in the world and to behaviors we see happening at Shelter. Our training does not get stale. It is dynamic, engaging, and always relevant. Before Vyond, we never had people tell us that they enjoyed the cybersecurity training we offered. They do now.”