How to Conduct an Effective Phishing Test for Employees?

Organizations need to pay great care while dealing with phishing attacks as these phishing emails contain malicious links or attachments. Clicking on these unknown and untrusted emails can lead to compromise of confidential details and result in financial losses.

According to statistics by Verizon DBIR, it shows that 74% of security breaches involve human error or social engineering attacks. To tackle these modern cyber threats, it demands the need of proper security awareness training for reducing the chances of human error. Also, highlight the importance of providing training based on simulations of multiple attack vectors.

There is a need to adopt phishing test for employees ​ to test identification and recognizing capabilities against phishing and social engineering attempts. Using phishing simulations and providing proper awareness training helps to strengthen cybersecurity posture and reduce security breaches.

What is a Phishing Test for Employees?

Phishing test is also known as Phishing simulation. In this approach, fake emails are sent to employees to test their identification and recognition capability against various cyber-attacks.

The aim of this methodology is to assess and improve employee’s ability to detect phishing attempts. It also helps in strengthening the defense mechanism of the organization.

It helps in identifying vulnerabilities, measuring the effectiveness of security awareness training, and reduce the chances of phishing attempts.

Some Common Techniques Used By Attackers To Target Organizations

Organizations have become the prime target of cybercriminals, they use phishing tactics to target employees and senior management. The aim of these attacks is to gain monetary benefits and damage the brand reputation of the organization. 

The following are the techniques which are used by attackers to target organizations:-

1. Ransomware Attacks: Attackers might use phishing emails to deliver ransomware. The victim’s data is encrypted and to get these confidential details decrypted, a ransom is demanded by cybercriminals to get the original data back.
2. Callback Phishing: Hackers embed phone numbers in emails and try to convince victims to call and divulge them to reveal sensitive information by using voice phishing tactics.
3. Credential Theft: Cybercriminals steal login credentials of emails, banking details and social media accounts to gain unauthorized access. Further use this for monetary benefits and exploiting the victims.
4. Email Tracking: Attackers are using modern tactics like the use of marketing technologies to track email metrics. This helps in optimizing their phishing campaigns.
5. Clone Websites: Nowadays, hackers make clone websites of legitimate sites. By using these clone websites hackers intend to trick users into providing sensitive details.

Process to Conduct a Phishing Test for Employees?

With the continuous increase in phishing attacks, there is a need to implement phishing tests systematically and strengthen defense mechanisms against cyberattacks. Following is the process mentioned below for conducting a phishing test:-

1. Planning: The organization needs to define the objective and scope of the phishing test.
2. Creation: To mimic real-world attacks, there is a need to create realistic phishing emails.
3. Send: After the creation process there is a need to send these phishing emails to selected employees.
4. Monitor: Now, organizations need to track employee’s interaction with phishing emails.
5. Analyze: The data received through the monitoring stage needs to be analyzed so that the scope of improvement can be identified.
6. Train: Based on the analysis, there is a need to provide feedback to the employees who are vulnerable to these phishing emails.
7. Repeat: The whole process needs to be repeated and phishing tests should be conducted on a regular basis so that employees are aware of phishing attacks.

Benefits of Phishing Simulations

Phishing simulations help in many ways to strengthen security posture. Following are the benefits of phishing simulations mentioned below:-

• It helps organization to enhance security posture by training employees on various simulations of different cyberattacks.
• Conducting regular simulations helps employees to be ready against upcoming threats and apply mitigation strategies to protect confidential details.
• Organizations can track employee’s responses over time and analyze employee’s vulnerability to cyberattacks.
• Helps in strengthening employees from potential vulnerabilities into strong defenses against cyber threats.
• Phishing testing also reduces the chances of security breaches as identifying vulnerabilities and training staff helps in strengthening the security structure of the organization.

Real-Life Examples of Phishing Attacks

Microsoft Breach (January 2024)

Incident

Microsoft discovered that its senior management and employee email accounts had been breached. The attackers used brute-force attacks to gain unauthorized access.

Impact

Due to this data breach, internal communication details were leaked and raised risk associated with the credentials of the employees.

Key Takeaways

The attack emphasized the need for proper security posture within the organization. There is a need to implement MFA, and strict security policies need to be enforced to protect employees and senior-level email accounts.

Reference: Firewall Times

Open AI Phishing attempt (October 2024)

Incident

In this incident, attackers targeted OpenAI employees with phishing emails that contained malicious links and attachments. The aim of this attack was to infiltrate the internal system with malware.

Impact

The attempt was blocked but revealed the prominent attempts by hackers to steal confidential details and infect IT infrastructure with malicious files.

Key Takeaways

From this attack, we learned the importance of training employees to identify phishing emails.

Reference: Bloomberg

Why is Phishing Testing Essential for Employees?

• Phishing tests play a major role in simulating real-world attacks and use this process for evaluating employee’s vulnerability.
• These phishing tests often are part of broader cybersecurity training programs and help in reinforcing learning methodology.
• Regular testing helps in identifying and mitigating potential security weaknesses present in the security structure of the organization.
• Employees responses received through phishing tests help the organization to track progress and make significant improvements to reduce phishing attacks.
• It helps to promote a security-first culture by empowering employees to stay updated against the latest threats and report in case of suspicious activities.
• Making employees aware through phishing simulations, helps in enhancing their knowledge about the latest trends and patterns hackers use for conducting various phishing attacks. 

Threatcop Approach to Tackle Phishing Attacks

TSAT (Threatcop Security Awareness Training)

Threatcop’s TSAT provides cyber-attack simulation of multiple attack vectors such as Phishing, Smishing, Vishing, Ransomware, QR Code Scams, WhatsApp Phishing and Attachment-Based Phishing.

TSAT aims to help organizations in training employees on modern simulations and improve their identification and recognition capabilities while dealing with real-world cyber threats.

Features of TSAT

• Offers simulations of multiple attack vectors to mimic real-world scenarios.
• Organizations can track employee’s progress through their vulnerability score.
• The availability of real-time dashboards with detailed reports help in streamlining the process to get breach and attack details.
• For meeting modern training needs it offers AI template generation for better customization.
• TSAT’s Direct Mail injection (DMI) feature bypasses email filters and delivers phishing simulations directly to inboxes without the need for whitelisting.
• It also provides advanced features of website cloning and QR code/WhatsApp phishing simulation to make organizations ready against modern cyber threats.

TLMS (Threatcop Learning Management System)

Threatcop’s TLMS helps organization to make their employees aware through interactive content like videos, infographics, posters, newsletters, comics and wallpapers to make the training and learning process interactive and easily understand core concepts of cybersecurity. 

It also offers security awareness games such as cyber challenges, hack attacks, word hunts and escape rooms to make learning fun and easier while understanding various cyberattacks and tactics used by attackers.

Features of TLMS

• TLMS offers multiple content categories, interactive courses, and various customization to meet department-specific needs.
• It has support for multilingual languages and also provides region-specific content in local languages.
• Automates progress reports by using the feature of hierarchical learners reporting which is based on the employee-manager hierarchy
• For better accessibility and engagement, it can audio playback in multiple languages.
• Exciting new games like “Hack Attack” and “Role Based Gamification” make learning interactive and understanding concepts of cybersecurity easy.
• In TLMS for enhanced email template controls it supports advanced customization for email layouts and branding.

Conclusion

To tackle modern phishing tactics, conducting phishing tests has become an essential step for the organization. It is not just the assessment but also provides valuable learning opportunities.

Also, conducting regular testing and providing security awareness training coupled with feedback helps to make employees ready. Through this process organizations can fix the vulnerabilities and potential weaknesses present in the security infrastructure of the organization.

The ultimate aim is to reduce the chances of human error and make employees ready in such a way that they do not become the victim of cyberfraud on digital platforms.

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