Q&A With Carolin Desirée Toepfer – Cyttraction

Aviva Zacks Aviva Zacks

Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.

Cyttraction: Back in Germany in 2016, I founded my first company which was a technology consultancy helping SME with their digital transformation. Coming from self-taught coding and social science, I got deeper into the data protection and cybersecurity bubble, as I needed this knowledge for my own projects. At the same time, I learned that most learning solutions around digital skills and risk topics are based on fear and force to get employees in and make them watch outdated content – and that the outcome is poor. Together with my team, we also had a mind-opening research project around virtual and augmented reality for risk training, where we looked at the influence on the learner’s brain and how this might create confidence to solve such situations in real life. In early 2020, those collected learnings lead to a project we first called “CDT Security” and that later became Cyttraction.

SD: What is the main service your company offers?

Cyttraction: Cyttraction will be a super-compliant global risk training platform and governance tool that offers highly attractive and job-specific training for employees as well as a business partner and worst case overview for CISO and compliance managers. We are developing this platform while working with real clients. If you are a US or EU+ company, you can already book online workshops, enterprise learning programs, and cloud learning integrations as well as partner portal listings on our website.

SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?

Cyttraction: All of our team members, freelancers, and advisors are senior experts and we are spending a lot of time on out-of-the-box research as well as talking and listening to learners and decision-makers. Also, being an entrepreneur in the B2B tech space for more than 5 years, I am very well aware of business processes and implementation needs on the client side. This and our creative yet efficient production plan compared with an advanced machine learning approach to keep learner interaction up will make Cyttraction quite different from other market players.

SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?

Cyttraction: For the company that has been hit hard, every threat is the worst. What really shocks me is that still 85% – 90% of successful hacker attacks are more or less a result of human error. This number is far too high and our mission is to lower it while providing a fun learning experience and valuable tool for our clients.

About the Author
Aviva Zacks
Aviva Zacks
Cybersecurity Expert and Writer

About the Author

Aviva Zacks is a content manager, writer, editor, and really good baker. When she's not working, she enjoys reading on her porch swing with a cup of decaf.