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Real World Testing: The Importance of Phishing Simulations

Cybersecurity is a vital consideration for your business. After all, threats lurking around every corner, and ensuring you’re secure can be the difference between being protected and falling victim to a debilitating attack.

One of the most popular — and effective — forms of cyberattacks is using social engineering to exploit unsuspecting and uneducated victims. This involves tricking them into believing that you are a trusted party and attempting to lift key information or credentials to be able to gain access to your systems.

In this article, we’re going to go over the importance of phishing simulations, and how they can help you combat the social engineering attacks that your business needs to be aware of.

What are Phishing Simulations?

Phishing simulations are imitations of real phishing attacks that organisations can use to test employees and assess knowledge levels. They mirror the regular emails and other phishing threats that employees may face — and are often indistinguishable from an actual phishing attempt.

Essentially, as an employer, you’d send this out to employees and assess their reaction to the attempt. This isn’t a point of shame, however, and isn’t for calling out employees for falling for attacks. Instead, the focus should be on educating employees and ensuring that everyone is ready for the phishing threats they face.

After all, phishing attacks are designed to be as indistinguishable from real attacks as possible. They exist to prey on the uneducated, so making sure that everyone in your company is educated is vital.

Why Phishing Simulations Are Essential

Phishing simulations are essential to make sure that your employees don’t fall victim to phishing attacks. They are a safe environment to teach your employees how to detect and avoid phishing attacks, while also being immersive and realistic — meaning that it is a good showcase of how phishing attacks can be in person.

Using the information from these simulations will let you take action to help support these employees with information and further training to ensure that they don’t fall victim to phishing attacks — ultimately creating a more security-aware culture within your business. This is the best way of combating social engineering attacks, as being knowledgeable makes them ineffective.

Benefits of Regular Phishing Tests

Regular phishing tests are incredibly beneficial for your business, as they allow you to educate your employees on how to spot and combat phishing attacks. After all, education is the key to fighting these attacks and making sure everyone is aware of the thorough steps to take when checking communications is paramount.

Here are some of the key benefits of regular phishing tests —

  • Improve Employee Awareness: As mentioned above, employee awareness is vital for combating phishing and social engineering attacks. Making sure everyone is not only informed but up to date on the latest advancements in these attacks will ensure that nobody falls victim.
  • Cost-Effective Training: Phishing tests are very cost-effective, as they offer an unmatched form of testing for a relatively low cost. Rather than training every employee and taking their time up — when some are already savvy enough to avoid these attacks — you can use phishing tests to find the people who are more likely to fall victim.
  • Real-World Preparedness: Nothing is better than real-world experience and examples of the attacks that you can face. Theory only takes you so far, and so being able to train in real-world scenarios means that your employees will be able to see a real example of what they’ll face.
  • Build a Security-Conscious Culture: Security is vital in the modern day, and so building a culture that is not only aware of security but is conscious of it will ensure that security comes before all else in your business.

Ultimately, being able to take advantage of phishing simulations to train your employees to be aware of social engineering attacks will help them be able to proactively see if they are being phished, and make for a great way of educating people so they don’t fall victim.

When combined with other security solutions such as multi-factor authentication, it’s easy to create an ironclad security solution for social engineering, and phishing tests are just one of the many options available. But, when it comes to training, the experience provided by phishing simulations is second to none.

Common Challenges and Solutions

While phishing simulations are great, several challenges can come with implementing them. Here are a few of the challenges, and how you can solve them —

  • Inappropriate Frequency: Sending too many of these phishing tests will be a hindrance to your employees, and will also generally make the tests less effective. Much like a fire drill, a high-frequency risks people taking actual attacks less seriously. It’s important to find a balance here.
  • Generic Scenarios: If the scenarios are too generic, they can be unrealistic and break the immersion. More customised scenarios tailored to your business will help this — it will take more time and planning but will ensure you get the most out of your tests.
  • Punitive Measures: Punishing your employees for failing these tests isn’t the goal. Of course, repeated failure and negligence of security is a different story, but these tests are here to make sure everyone can protect themselves — so, providing support is paramount.
  • Neglecting Follow-Up: By failing to effectively follow up on your tests, they essentially become ineffective. Providing support is vital, and making sure to do this is essential to making your simulations successful.

How We Can Help

Phishing simulations will allow you to prepare your employees for phishing attacks, and ensure that they’re aware of how to look out for them. By doing so, you can find employees who are more likely to fall victim and support them directly.

If you want to get started with phishing simulations but need assistance, reach out to us today. We’re here to help and will ensure that you have all the support you need for your simulations to be successful.

Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.