Branching Scenarios - Hut Six Product Update

One of the greatest challenges when developing a secure culture within the work force is ensuring that employees are able and confident in applying knowledge gained through training. How can you ensure that your employees know how to best apply this knowledge should a security incident arise?

Hut Six has developed a series of new scenario-based ‘branching’ tutorials that provide an immersive and interactive experience for the user. These new tutorials bring Hut Six's training ever closer to simulating real life security breaches. Released once a month and designed to revisit key learning objectives from the year one curriculum, branching tutorials contextualise best practice with a high level of detail. These tutorials follow simulated incidents based on common security threats which develop as the user’s actions affect the narrative.

By leveraging this new branching feature, we can augment and enrich our training in the following ways:

As a tool for maintaining a security-first culture

While training modules correspond to a more traditional style for initial training, branching tutorials offer a more practical and realistic experience to the user. At numerous points throughout the tutorial, the user is given the choice to perform a certain action or make a decision. Depending on the outcome of this decision, the storyline ‘branches’ or takes the path that results from that decision. This provides employees with a means of applying their knowledge gained from training to information security related situations that could occur in the workplace.

As a means of testing training effectiveness

Branching tutorials are designed to be completed following the year one curriculum in order to assess the user’s capability in a simulated working situation. There are several final outcomes for each tutorial, the arrival at each reflecting the level of knowledge of that user. Each path offers a nuanced appraisal of a user’s knowledge, providing account administrators with an insight into the effectiveness of modules undertaken in the first year of Hut Six Training.

Allowing for a more enjoyable experience

Focusing upon a single narrative rather than multiple examples of a particular issue allows for engaging storytelling, whilst the branching mechanism emphasises the impacts even our smallest decisions can have when pitted against a talented attacker.  This stresses the importance of the user’s decision and the impact it can have on your organisation. Moreover, the interactive component enables the user to feel completely immersed in the situation in order to increase their security awareness through linear progression through the simulated situation.

Ensuring continued employee engagement

By allowing the user to decide what happens next, we dramatically increase the level of user engagement, taking the user from merely a spectator, to being the central character. Giving power to the user is pivotal to your organisation’s goals of reinforcing your security culture, as training content is kept enjoyable, improving uptake amongst your workforce.

The first in our series of branching tutorials focuses on password security and follows a breach where the user’s decisions affect how severe the breach becomes.  This tutorial features many real-life situations which reinforce the importance of password security within a company and inform the user on how to react should such a situation ever arise.

Branching tutorials complement the year one curriculum of Hut Six training and ensure a continued security-aware culture within your organisation that mitigates risks to your organisation’s security and personal information.