Ep. 150 - Security Awareness Series - Getting Senior Management Buy-In With Michael Fortune

The Social-Engineer Podcast

In this episode, Chris Hadnagy and Ryan MacDougall are joined by Michael Fortune. Michael is the Security Behaviours Team Manager for British Telecom (BT) UK. Michael has been with BT for an amazing 22 years, where he is currently BT’s expert on security behavior, insider threat behavior, and social engineering, and helps guides the business around these risks. With over 160 thousand employees across the globe in his charge, Michael helps run a team of experts who support and drive security programs for the company.  July 19, 2021

00:00 – Intro

www.social-engineer.com

www.social-engineer.org

www.innocentlivesfoundation.org

Managed Voice Phishing 

Managed Email Phishing 

Adverserial Simulations 

Social-Engineer channel on SLACK 

CLUTCH 

03:37 – Michael Fortune Intro

05:22 – Michael’s Path – how has your background in psychology helped with cyber and information security?

06:10 – Have you been able to use psychological principles in eduction?

07:27 – How do you keep education engaging for 160,000 people?

10:07 – Top down approach

12:51 – You are essentially performing an SE gig in order to get an SE gig

14:03 – What’s your rule set?

15:59 – Senior Management Buy In – people are afraid of doing that so they don’t do it. How do you approach that?

19:08 – Where is the ethical line in using social engineering to get buy-in?

21:21 – Explaining to upper management the repercussions of not doing this training

22:52 – Were your CISO and Director of Protections always on board or did you have to convince them?

25:56 – What have you learned from your hundreds of thousands of SMishing attacks under your belt?

29:18 – Advice about getting buy-in from the top down can work for any sized company

30:30 – When you talk about personalizing the sessions that you do, do you personalize to the department, or

33:05 – Following through with a good program

36:24 – The idea is to get people to do it

36:38 – What colleagues do you respect most in the industry?

• Steve Benton – Deputy CISO at BT
• Chris Hadnagy

39:22 – What are some action steps that corporations should start doing right now?

42:00 – Experience is everything

42:40 –

Book Recommendations

• Behave by Robert Sapolsky

44:48 – You need patience, because human being is different and complex

45:13 – Michael Fortune on the internet: [e-mail]