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Security awareness is an organization’s greatest defense against threat actors. Yet, research shows that last year, 80% of organizations suffered one or more breaches that they could attribute to a lack of cybersecurity skills and/or awareness.
As a result, cybersecurity training is one of the easiest ways that an organization can protect its data from threat actors. That’s why cybersecurity training and upskilling providers like RangeForce, which today announced it has raised $20 million as part of a series B financing round, are receiving growing interest from investors.
RangeForce’s solution provides organizations with a cloud-based platform to assess, refine and validate cyber-readiness with content mapped to industry frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK and D3FEND. Through RangeForce’s platform, security teams can practice containing simulated attacks in a staged environment.
More broadly, this funding indicates that security awareness is playing a critical role in helping organizations maintain their data security. After all, employees not only need to have the awareness to spot common threats like phishing emails and social engineering scams, but security teams also need to learn how to remediate breaches ASAP to minimize the damage.
Security awareness has grown ever more important over the past few years, as more and more cybercriminals have turned to manipulating employees with phishing emails and social engineering scams to give up information. Research from Verizon shows that 82% of breaches involve the human element.
“While the skill shortage plagues cybersecurity, attackers are not letting up. As a result, overloaded cybersecurity teams struggle to build and validate key defensive skills when it matters most: before an attack,” said Taavi Must, CEO and cofounder of RangeForce.
Preventing breaches now comes down to focusing on mitigating human risk. “Humans are the weakest link in cybersecurity. By strengthening human defense readiness with RangeForce, organizations reduce their cyber-risk and their human capital spend,” Must said.
RangeForce’s approach is focused on enabling employees to develop the hands-on cyberskills they need via simulated breach exercises, so they can identify and respond to social engineering threats and phishing scams.
A look at the security awareness training market
Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that the overall market for security awareness training products and services will be worth $10 billion annually by 2027.
One of RangeForce’s main competitors, Immersive Labs, has raised $66 million in funding for a cyberworkforce-resilience platform that provides security teams with cyberevent simulations and cybersecurity labs to measure an organization’s cyber knowledge.
Another competitor is Cyberbit, which raised $70 million in funding from Charlesbank in 2020. Cyberbit’s platform enables security teams to undergo cyberattack simulations to identify gaps in their incident response capabilities via a readiness score.
Must argues that the key differentiator between RangeForce and other competitors is its continuous cyber-readiness assessment capabilities.
“RangeForce is designed to teach learners, providing enough support to snare consistent and continuous improvement, Must said. “We guide learners through a concept and ensure their comprehension, rather than just assessing their knowledge.”
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