Why cybersecurity training isn’t enough to stop phishing hacks
Marketplace Tech
American Public Media
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A recent study of nearly 20,000 University of California, San Diego Health workers found cybersecurity training reduced the likelihood of successful phising attacks by just 2%.
Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Ariana Mirian, senior researcher at the cybersecurity firm Censys and co-author of the study, who explained that many workers are just not taking those training programs seriously enough.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That cybersecurity training you took at work, probably not enough to prevent attacks. |
| 0:06.8 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. |
| 0:09.6 | I'm Novosafo. |
| 0:19.7 | A lot of us have had to take training to spot fishing scams. |
| 0:23.5 | That's when cyber criminals get you to click on a link and boom, they're inside your organization's system. |
| 0:28.8 | A recent study examined nearly 20,000 workers at UC San Diego Health. |
| 0:33.8 | It found cybersecurity training made little difference in preventing successful fishing attacks, |
| 0:38.8 | reducing the likelihood by just 2%. |
| 0:42.1 | Arianna Miriam at the cybersecurity firm's census co-authored the study, |
| 0:47.7 | and she told me many workers are just not taking those trainings seriously enough. |
| 0:52.6 | Across the four training groups, the median, so 50% of people and less, spent anywhere |
| 0:59.1 | from zero to 10 seconds on the training. |
| 1:03.1 | And so people just aren't spending time on training. |
| 1:07.1 | Now, when you say training, are we talking about something they have to read or a video they have to watch? |
| 1:13.4 | What are we talking about? |
| 1:14.3 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 1:15.2 | They either got a static webpage. |
| 1:18.6 | So, you know, imagine just like, hey, you clicked on a fishing link from UCSD Health. |
| 1:23.0 | No worries. |
| 1:23.7 | This was just a test. |
| 1:25.0 | And it had some information about what to look out for to to avoid this in the |
| 1:29.4 | future and then there was the interactive training and instead of just a one page or right in front of you |
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