From ransomware to resilience: how GAM Soluciones builds human firewalls with Kymatio

The company: comprehensive industrial solutions worldwide

GAM Soluciones is a multinational company born in Asturias (Spain), dedicated to offering comprehensive machinery solutions for the industry. With 75 branches, 1,200 users, and an approximate fleet of 22,000 machines, GAM provides services across diverse sectors and geographies.

Why Kymatio?

“At GAM Soluciones, we have launched multiple improvement projects, including sustainable development goals related to digitalization. To address these properly, we needed cybersecurity associated with tools such as Kymatio®.

Our decision to select the Kymatio® platform for managing employee cyber risk was mainly based on the ability to have a dashboard that shows how aware our users are regarding cybersecurity domains. It also enables us to understand to what extent our employees, when receiving information, are prepared to process or discard it—especially in the case of malicious emails (spoofing or phishing).”

— Juan José Rodríguez, Chief Information Officer at GAM Soluciones

A user-friendly platform with executive visibility

“Kymatio® is the only platform we considered reliable and sufficiently user-friendly to allow employees to build awareness automatically, while at the same time giving me, as CIO, useful information to present to the executive committee and to have global visibility of security at the workstation and user level.

What surprised me most about Kymatio® is its usability. It is a very user-friendly tool. I greatly value the fact that the platform automatically insists on awareness, autonomously reminds employees about available sessions, and that the assessment sessions of alertness and awareness also provide support whenever a user makes a mistake, such as with chatbot questions.

I especially value the ability to obtain aggregated information about all users, displayed in a dashboard that facilitates executive decisions on awareness, seeing results, and reinforcing them when necessary. In the market, to have a similar functionality you would either need to use much more sophisticated and expensive tools, or you would have to train and raise awareness manually.”

Human firewalls aligned with SOC alerts

“We are managing to equate malicious email alerts from the physical firewall with those reported by employees—our human firewalls.

At GAM Soluciones, we included Kymatio® as part of a master plan for cybersecurity awareness that we began more than a year ago. At that time, we were attacked with ransomware, triggered by a human security failure. That forced us to search the market for solutions available, with a special focus on user awareness.

The automation that Kymatio® provides prevents us, as the IT department, from having to constantly monitor employees. It automates awareness while giving me valuable information afterwards. Above all, it allows reinforcement while reducing the workload for the IT department.”

Benefits for employees and beyond

“From the employee’s perspective, the platform is perceived as useful. They can log in at any time, check their status, archetype category, user profile, and awareness rating.

It is interesting for employees to even reinforce themselves proactively, and this goes beyond the corporate scope—I believe it is very useful for any environment, both for employees and for technology users at home. Raising awareness of users both in the domestic and corporate environment is always beneficial and reduces the risk surface for corporate data security. Kymatio® undoubtedly helps a great deal in this.”

“At GAM, we are achieving alignment between the alerts coming from our SOC (Security Operations Center) and the reports from employees regarding potential malicious emails. This means that we are equating the physical firewall we deploy to protect the network with the human firewall that identifies malicious emails and reports them as potential threats. This, I believe, shows the true value of how Kymatio® is working inside the company.”

How GAM Soluciones uses Kymatio

Here you can find the complete version of the interview with Juan José Rodríguez, CIO of GAM Soluciones, who relies on Kymatio® to raise awareness and prepare employees to face cybersecurity threats.