With almost a million phishing sites active in Q1 2024, businesses of all sizes should take every precaution against this prevalent threat to their sensitive employee and client data. Since employees voluntarily give information to phishers, these scams can steal valuable information regardless of the strength of the business’s cybersecurity system.
Phishing simulation allows businesses to fight back by preparing their employees for real-world phishing attempts. Implementing an effective phishing simulation strategy will protect employee and client information from theft and notify administrators of network vulnerabilities.
Consider these steps for implementing a versatile phishing simulation strategy to protect your employees, customers, and clients from the latest scams.
1. Understand the Threat
While phishing is commonly associated with elder fraud, business email phishing scams successfully targeted over 21,000 employees in 2023. Other types of phishing include text message scans (“smishing”) or targeted attacks against a specific, high-value employee (“spear phishing”).
Phishing only endangers businesses if employees lack the awareness, caution, and digital literacy to recognize a scam and change their behavior accordingly. However, in the age of generative AI, tools such as ChatGPT can generate convincing scams in the form of professional business emails, online forms, links, and social media posts.
Due to the speed and effectiveness of these tools, phishing scams no longer require expertise or effort to create. Business managers, team leaders, and network administrators must understand that phishing can happen to anyone.
Technical security measures, such as network scans and data monitoring systems, can reduce the damage caused by phishing. However, only human error makes phishing possible in the first place, which is why simulations can mitigate the risk at the source.
2. Create an Accurate Simulation
A phishing simulation allows managers to test their workforce’s digital literacy without risking sensitive data. While conventional employee training methods such as videos and text courses can increase awareness, they cannot prepare employees to face the threat of an accurately generated modern phishing scam.
Phishing simulations can provide targeted awareness to vulnerable employees, provided they contain these essential features:
Realistic Phishing Scenarios: Cybercriminals use company-specific information such as logos, personnel names, phone numbers, email addresses, and more to create convincing phishing forms. Recognizing scams requires a working knowledge of common strategies, which advanced simulations can demonstrate.- Performance Data Collection: Phishing simulations will reveal network vulnerabilities. To fill these security gaps, business managers can use simulation performance data such as click rates, click locations, and reporting times to understand their network’s specific vulnerabilities better. This data can then be compared over time to observe the effectiveness of the awareness training and the areas that still need improvement.
- Simulation Feedback: Simulation feedback must be clear, constructive, and immediate to help employees understand their mistakes in a relevant context. Managers can provide additional simulations and learning materials to help vulnerable employees improve their resistance to common phishing strategies. By adopting a real-time communication and training reinforcement strategy, managers can improve employee awareness more responsively than conventional security training methods.
3. Set Clear Organizational Objectives
Effective phishing simulations, including data collection and feedback workflows, require clear objectives. The overall goal of simulations is to reduce the workforce’s click rate on potentially malicious links and increase the rate at which employees report suspicious emails to their administrators.
However, organizations can set custom goals for their situation, such as identifying individuals who fail simulations and assigning targeted training materials to them. Additionally, employees who handle more sensitive identifying information, such as HR or financial managers, could be recognized as a higher risk and given more directed attention in the security awareness training process.
4. Track Progress and Set Testing Frequency
While phishing is a dangerous threat to modern business networks, underusing or overusing simulations can reduce their effectiveness. “Alert fatigue” is the name given to security systems that overprepare employees to the point that they fail to take real threats seriously. Monthly phishing simulations may be sufficient to set a training baseline.
The simulations should run for at least a few days and up to a week to accumulate meaningful data. The timing should be adjusted and randomized to prevent employees from predicting the simulations. Additionally, training progress should be monitored in real-time to test the effectiveness of the simulations and adjust the strategy where needed.
Contact an Experienced Security Firm to Boost Cybersecurity Awareness
Employees may be at different levels of data literacy and have access to varying levels of secure information. Yet, all employees can become targets of modern phishing scams, which attempt to farm identifying information and company log-in data from unsuspecting users.
Phishing simulations allow businesses to test employees’ awareness of scamming strategies and improve their reporting rates. Effective simulations use real-world examples, convincing language, and reporting tools to test employees while providing managers with updated performance metrics to change and improve the simulations over time.
Contact our cybersecurity professionals today to learn how phishing simulations can be effectively integrated into your security workflow. At Advantage.Tech, we work with businesses of all sizes in over 800 industries to deliver IT and security solutions that prepare employees and protect valuable company data from the latest cybersecurity threats, including phishing scams.