Interactive Awareness Lessons: train employees by practising real attack situations

Arsen built-in awareness lessons put employees into realistic situations instead of a page of text followed by a single-choice question. Learners inspect a suspicious email, reply to an attacker's text messages, take a fraudulent phone call or rebuild an incident procedure, so the secure behavior is practised before it is needed.

How it works

Each built-in lesson follows three stages. It first checks what the learner already understands, then asks them to practise the expected behavior in a realistic workplace scenario, and ends by having them apply it to their own work before a short debrief reinforces the key point.

The interactive components sit inside that flow, between explanations, and replace the sequence of single-choice questions the lessons relied on. Content depth follows the familiarity level the learner selects at the start of the lesson: more explanation and guidance for beginners, practical decisions for intermediate learners, and concise content that sharpens existing knowledge for familiar learners. The introduction and the difficulty question of each lesson stay the same.

Scoring is unchanged. The multiple-choice questions remain the basis of the lesson score and the interactive components do not count toward it, so completion and score statistics in training reports keep the same meaning.

The interactive components run in the Arsen platform. Lessons delivered in Microsoft Teams keep the standard multiple-choice format, and no interactive version is planned for Microsoft Teams or Slack.

This work continues the redesign of Arsen's cyber awareness training platform. Interactive components are extended lesson by lesson, based on customer feedback.

Standard and interactive lessons compared

• A standard lesson checks whether the employee recognizes the right answer among a few options.
• An interactive lesson checks whether the employee applies it: finding the clue, refusing the request, taking the steps in the right order. That is the behavior a real attacker tests.

Requirements

• No setup. Built-in Arsen lessons are updated for every customer and keep their identifiers, so training programs already in place deliver the interactive version without any change.
• Learners follow their lessons in the Arsen platform. In Microsoft Teams and Slack, lessons keep the standard multiple-choice format.
• Lesson scores and training reports work as before. Interactive steps are not part of the score.

Interactive components in Arsen lessons

Inspection exercises and true or false cards

Inspection exercises display a realistic screen with clickable areas: some hold the clue to find, others are decoys. In Business Email Compromise and Spear Phishing, the learner inspects an email in an Outlook view and selects what gives the attack away, such as the sender domain or a request built on urgency. In OAuth Permission Abuse, the learner reviews a Microsoft consent screen for a meeting scheduling app and selects the permissions it has no reason to request, such as reading and writing the mailbox. In Data Handling & Sharing, the learner picks the spreadsheet columns that should not be shared with a partner.

True or false cards are short series of three or four statements on one topic. Learners swipe left or right on mobile, or select true or false on a computer.

SMS conversation

In the Smishing lesson, the learner receives a text message from someone posing as IT support who asks for a Microsoft verification code. The learner replies in the conversation and the scenario adapts to the answers, showing how an attacker uses the code to sign in in the employee's place.

Phone calls

Phone call exercises ring a simulated phone and play a voice conversation. The Vishing lesson reproduces an IT support call that comes with a code notification. The Deepfakes lesson plays a multi-turn call with a cloned executive voice, so employees hear what a voice deepfake sounds like. The Social Engineering Psychology lesson uses a call to show pressure built on authority and urgency.

The Vishing lesson: an IT support call that comes with a code notification.

Ordering and ranking

Drag-and-drop exercises give a list of statements to reorder. Learners rebuild a procedure in the right order, for example the response to a patient data breach in HIPAA Patient Data or to an exposed secret in Secrets in Code Repositories, or rank situations by risk, as in Cloud Storage Security Essentials and SaaS Access Risks.

Breach check and password strength

The Credential Compromise and Password Hygiene lessons include two dedicated components. The breach check shows whether the learner's email address appears in known data breaches and, when it does, lists the actions to take: change reused passwords, turn on MFA for main accounts and alert the company. The password strength tester estimates how long an automated attack would take to crack a password and compares complex passwords with passphrases. The test runs locally and the password is not sent anywhere.

Which lessons use which interaction?

The table lists the built-in lessons, grouped by the interaction each one uses.

Every employee enrolled in an Arsen training program receives these lessons at the program cadence, with no change to how programs are built or assigned. The conversation and call lessons, Smishing, Vishing, Deepfakes and Social Engineering Psychology, are the closest to what employees face in a real attack, where the pretext arrives by phone or text rather than by email.