Key Takeaways
- Phishing is a Threat to SMBs: Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are common targets for phishing attacks, making employee training essential.
- Routine Simulations Build Resilience: Regular phishing simulations help employees recognize and respond to phishing attempts, reducing the risk of successful attacks.
- Effective Training is Key: Engaging, challenging, and regular phishing simulations significantly improve employees’ ability to spot and report phishing attempts.
Can you spot a phishing email?
Hopefully, the answer is “yes,” but things become more complex for enterprises with thousands of employees.
Data taken from the 2023 Gone Phishing Tournament found that 10.3% of organizations with 10,000 or more employees are likely to click on a phishing email link.
That’s about 1,000 employees on average who are clicking on malicious links, unknowingly leaking sensitive data into the hands of attackers. The frustrating part is that it could have been easily prevented by conducting routine phishing simulations.
In this blog, we’ll explore the main benefits of performing routine phishing simulations and how you can avoid becoming the target of a sophisticated phishing attack.
Why Are Phishing Simulations So Important
A phishing simulation is a cybersecurity exercise that involves sending realistic phishing emails and scenarios to test employees’ ability to recognize and respond to potential phishing attacks.
Without phishing training and awareness, a potentially harmful email can easily bypass all spam filters and wind up in an employee’s inbox. Even worse is that it won’t get reported to the IT team either. A study found that only 18.3% of emails sent as part of phishing simulations were properly reported by users.
Not exactly reassuring.
Phishing simulations help educate employees on how to identify and report suspicious emails effectively. That means not hesitating to notify IT the instant a suspicious-looking email hits their inbox. And that happens quite often, despite having spam filters and advanced security tools. Even the most well-trained employees can miss all the warning signs. It takes only a matter of seconds to get distracted and click on a malicious file attachment that looks like it came from a legitimate source, especially if the email text language mimics someone familiar within the organization. Malicious LLMs give attackers an advantage.
AI-generated phishing attacks have added a new level of complexity to the game. Research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to AI-automated phishing, further noting that the entire phishing process can be automated using LLMs, which reduces the costs of phishing attacks by more than 95% while achieving equal or greater success rates.
Conducting routine phishing simulations can help minimize the risks of those attacks.
How Does a Phishing Simulation Work?
Phishing simulations typically provide a wide range of pre-built templates that mimic real-world phishing attacks. The simulations then quiz the employees on how well they can identify suspicious emails based on the actions taken. Audiences can be segmented by departments or by specific users and scheduled by time or date.
Key metrics to pay close attention to include:
- Open rates
- CTR
- Failure rates
- Attachment opening rate
- Click-to-report ratio
- Improvement rate
Invest the time to train the employees who miss these critical red flags:
- Anyone who forwards the phishing email to colleagues
- Anyone who opens a file attachment
- Not reporting the phishing attempt
Retest employees after several months and note any improvements. If the overall collective team score is low, consider improving your security awareness programs. Take a step back and reevaluate existing security policies and protocols. Are policies outdated? Do they properly address phishing tactics and other forms of social engineering?
Now would be a good time to update your policies and guidelines.
4 Effective Ways to Implement Phishing Simulations
Frequency: How often do you plan on testing your employees? Hopefully, not every three days or so. Phishing simulations should be run on a monthly or quarterly basis. Alternate the phishing templates to keep tests fresh and challenging. This ensures that employees are continually exposed to different types of phishing attempts.
Avoid predictability. Don’t send the emails out at the same each day. It’s important to randomize the timing intervals of the simulations to keep employees on their guard. It also encourages them to remain alert to phishing attempts at all times.
Introduce gamification: Phishing simulations should not feel like mandatory company obligations or forced security tests that employees dread completing. One way to make phishing simulations more engaging and exciting is via gamification.
Gamification keeps things fun and challenging. Create leaderboards with points and badges and award prizes to those who complete the simulations fastest with minimal to no errors. Gamification also helps boost productivity in the workforce as it keeps everyone motivated and incentivized. A lot of winning all around, literally.
Increase the level of difficulty: Go beyond the basics. Shift the challenge into second gear by creating targeted emails that appear to come from C-level executives or specific departments, also known as spear phishing. Why is this important? Spear phishing campaigns have an average click rate of 53.2%, significantly increasing the data breach risk.
Do you need to step the difficulty up another level? Simulate multi-stage phishing attacks, which involve a series of deceptive emails that gradually build trust with the recipient before delivering a malicious payload. If your employees can spot those types of phishing attempts, they have achieved Jedi-level phishing awareness.
Post-simulation training: What have your employees learned from the simulations? Can they recall how to spot a fake login page, or will they enter their credentials without hesitation? Post-simulation training is important for following up with employees long after they’ve completed the required test. This gives you the ability to monitor and track performance over time.
Create helpful materials and guidelines on phishing and social engineering that everyone can follow in simplistic language. Infographics work well. They are more digestible than a 50-page PDF as they visually summarize the technical details and highlight the key points.
And there you have it.
4 simple ways to implement phishing simulations into your organization. Whether you manage a team of 30 or run multiple enterprise accounts of over 10,000 employees, everyone should be well-educated on the topic of phishing.
Prevent Phishing Attacks in Advance with Guardz
Don’t wait until someone clicks on a real phishing URL. Take proactive security measures with Guardz Phishing Simulation.
Guardz leverages AI and LLMs to generate realistic phishing scenarios and personalized email templates within a few seconds.
Here’s how the simulation works. Simply choose a template and click “Assign” once you’re satisfied. You can also set the filters by a specific audience or set preferences based on industries for even more precise campaign targeting. Guardz will then send you a detailed summary once the simulation is completed.
Safeguard your employees and critical assets from phishing attacks with Guardz.
Schedule a demo to learn more.
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