How effective is company-wide phishing training?

No matter how well built your infrastructure is, your last line of defense is the human interaction or the “human firewall”. A phishing email is still one of the most common attacks for cybercriminals to gain access to a company’s infrastructure. With this in mind, security management teams are finding new ways to protect their organization from these types of attacks, one of which is phishing training.

A cyberattack can have multiple negative effects for an organization such as:

  • A decrease in the number of new customers
  • Existing customers wanting to leave 
  • Reputational damage 
  • Financial costs for threat remediation

According to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, 30% of phishing messages get opened by targeted users.

With appealing opening rates such as these, it’s no wonder cybercriminals continue to target victims both weak and strong.

How Phishing Training can help an organization:

  • Reporting data – Some phishing training software providers show data about attachments opened, number of clicks, and if the email was reported to the security team. This will allow you to identify individuals within your organization who consistently fail the phishing simulation.
  • Awareness of phishing attacks –  Phishing attack simulation shows your employees how successful an attack can potentially be. This can raise awareness within your workforce about a vulnerability that currently exists.

Common challenges around Phishing Training:

  • Cybersecurity may not be everyone’s forte – Your workforce is the best at what they do. However not all employees will fully understand phishing training and as cyber attacks develop, this could leave a potential blind spot within your organization.
  • Time and resources – Old habits are hard to break. Phishing training is an ongoing process that requires employees to take time out of their day-to-day tasks to keep on top of these simulated attacks. As a result, people may rush through the training modules in order to return back to their usual work, resulting in inaccurate reporting data.
  • Information overload – Employees have to remember a lot of information every day. Adding phishing training and internal policies on top of everyday tasks can cause information overload for employees, potentially leading to rushed decisions such as forgetting to double-check that the from address aligns with a record in the system.
  • Blame culture – Phishing training and subsequent testing promotes a culture of blame. Whilst testing helps to identify the people who regularly fail the training, the continual re-testing can be viewed by employees as unfair treatment or even punishment.

How to improve Phishing Training

Although phishing training increases employee awareness about potential threats, the majority of training tools will present your employees as the biggest vulnerability to your organization. Often, the training provided may not be as up to date as some of the real-life phishing attacks, making it impossible for your employees to be able to identify all types of cyberattack and leaving vulnerabilities. Providing your employees with tools that compliment existing phishing training can significantly reduce the impact of these threats.

OnINBOX by Red Sift replaces employee guesswork with expertise by acting as a security expert inside every email, providing a rigorous technical risk assessment before telling the recipient if it’s safe to trust the email or not when they open it. Everyone in your organization can be empowered by risk indicators inside the email itself to help them confidently spot risks, effectively reducing the burden of false positives on security teams and removing the “train and blame” culture.

Book a free platform demo today

Getting started with OnINBOX is simple, no software installation is required and centralized deployment for Office 365 and G suite mailboxes can be set up with just a few clicks! To see how OnINBOX works as part of our integrated email security and brand protection platform, book a free platform demo.

PUBLISHED BY

Murtazah Shah

15 Dec. 2020

SHARE ARTICLE:

Categories

Recent Posts

VIEW ALL
Product Release

Red Sift’s Spring 2024 Quarterly Product Release

Francesca Rünger-Field

This early into 2024, the cybersecurity space is already buzzing with activity. Emerging standards, such as Google and Yahoo’s bulk sender requirements, mark a new era of compliance for businesses reliant on email communication. At the same time, the prevalence of sophisticated cyber threats, such as the SubdoMailing campaign, emphasizes the continual hurdles posed…

Read more
Email

Navigating the “SubdoMailing” attack: How Red Sift proactively identified and remediated a…

Rebecca Warren

In the world of cybersecurity, a new threat has emerged. Known as “SubdoMailing,” this new attack cunningly bypasses some of the safeguards that DMARC sets up to protect email integrity.  In this blog we will focus on how the strategic investments we have made at Red Sift allowed us to discover and protect against…

Read more
Email

Where are we now? One month of Google and Yahoo’s new requirements…

Rebecca Warren

As of March 1, 2024, we are one month into Google and Yahoo’s new requirements for bulk senders. Before these requirements went live, we used Red Sift’s BIMI Radar to understand global readiness, and the picture wasn’t pretty.  At the end of January 2024, one-third of global enterprises were bound to fail the new…

Read more
Cybersecurity

Your guide to the SubdoMailing campaign

Billy McDiarmid

A significant number of well-known organizations have been attacked as part of what’s being called the SubdoMailing (Subdo) campaign that has been going on since at least 2022, research by Guardio Labs has revealed.   The scale of execution of this attack is staggering, and the impact is hugely damaging, but the goal is simple…

Read more