Cyber Readiness Institute
Welcome to the Cyber Readiness Institute weekly newsletter. By delivering short, no-jargon cybersecurity advice you can put to work immediately, we hope to help you build a resilient culture of cyber readiness—one tip at a time.
For the last two weeks of Cyber Awareness Month, we locked our digital front door with strong passphrases and MFA, then shut our open windows with software updates. But what happens when an attacker dresses up as a trusted vendor, client, or even a colleague, and knocks directly on the door? This week, we tackle the third habit of the Core Four: Phishing.
The traditional way of training employees to spot phishing focused heavily on basic technical warning signs—like looking for obvious spelling mistakes or poor grammar. In the age of AI, many of those traditional warning signs have disappeared. Attackers can now use generative AI tools to create highly personalized messages that look exactly like they came from trusted vendors, banks, colleagues, or customers. In the past, phishing training often involved sending simulated phishing emails to employees and forcing anyone who clicked on it to watch a training video.
More than ever, cybersecurity depends on employees working together to identify and report suspicious emails and text messages. Your final line of defense is your team’s ability to pause and verify who is knocking on the door before letting them in.
Here is your leadership plan for this week:
The Problem: Employees often believe that if an email looks professional and bypasses the spam filter, it must be safe. They don’t realize how easily AI can mimic trusted relationships.
Your Action (Monday or Tuesday): Send this quick, conversational message in your team chat or email:
“Hey team! We’ve locked our doors and shut our windows over the last two weeks. This week, we are talking about phishing and smishing (text phishing). Today’s phishing scams don’t look like obvious spam anymore—hackers are using AI to write flawless, highly realistic emails that look just like real messages from our actual vendors or even from me. If an email ever feels slightly unusual, urgent, or ‘off,’ don’t ignore it—let’s talk about how to verify it.”
The Problem: When employees suspect an email might be phishing, they often hesitate to report it because they aren’t 100% sure, or they simply aren’t clear on who to tell. They need absolute clarity and reassurance that it’s always better to ask than to guess.
Your Action (Wednesday): At the end of a scheduled meeting, secure a collective agreement:
“To protect our organization and our customers, I want to make sure we are all clear on what to do when an email or text feels ‘off.’ Can we agree that if any of us receives an email, text, or message that looks suspicious or makes an unexpected, urgent request, we will report it to [Insert IT contact/email] right away? Don’t worry about being 100% sure—it is always better to report a false alarm than to stay silent.”
Why it works: Establishing psychological safety is the absolute key to building a high-reporting culture where people feel safe raising their hand.
The Problem: When busy, people tend to just delete a suspicious email to clear their inbox, leaving the rest of the company exposed to the same attack.
Your Action (Friday): Give your team a simple, frictionless behavioral loop to turn suspicion into an immediate, active defense:
“IF an email feels unexpectedly urgent, asks for sensitive data, or requests an unusual payment, THEN I will immediately use our report button or forward a screenshot of the message to me or [email protected]) and delete the message”
Following our September 28th scorecard, your metric is positive engagement, not click failures:
On Friday afternoon, look at your designated phishing reporting inbox or ask the team: “Who flagged or reported a suspicious email this week? Let’s count them up!”
Your metric is your Reporting Rate. Celebrate a high volume of reports—even false alarms—because it proves your team is actively verifying who is at the door rather than letting them slide by.
A secure culture is not one where employees never make mistakes; it is one where they feel safe and motivated to report suspicious activity immediately. By guiding your team through Awareness, Commitment, and Action this week, you build a human firewall that is far stronger than any spam filter. Effective cyber defense is a team effort.
With our identity secured, devices patched, and defenses up against phishing, we face one final challenge: where our data actually lives and how it moves. Next week, we wrap up Cybersecurity Awareness Month with Week 4: Secure Storage & Sharing, and how to safely store and share data inside your organization and with your customers and suppliers.
Download the Playbook, and get your copy of the Playbook Guide to start planning today.
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The Cyber Readiness Institute (CRI) is an initiative that convenes business leaders from across sectors and geographic regions to share resources and knowledge that inform the development of free cybersecurity tools for small and medium-sized businesses. Advancing the cyber readiness of small and medium-sized businesses improves the security of global value chains.
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