Build a Phishing Simulation Program to Enhance Cybersecurity Awareness

Worse still, while a cyberattack on your IT systems is likely to be flagged, a seemingly innocuous email link that captures sensitive data can often slip through unnoticed until it’s too late. These factors make safeguarding your team and your company both challenging and essential.

What is a Phishing Scam?

A phishing scam is an attack that attempts to obtain important personally identifiable information such as passwords, banking information, or protected user credentials for key accounts. These attacks most often take place on websites that appear legitimate, often impersonating trustworthy domains, and use form fills to get victims to input the requested information. 

As many daily operations have moved online, phishing attacks have become increasingly commonplace. Access to even a single email account can lead to unimaginable damage and the cleanup from a phishing attack — when possible — is long and difficult.

What do look out for with phishing scams?

Spotting a phishing attack is not always simple. In fact, it can be pretty tricky - that’s part of why they catch so many people. Some of the nuances to be mindful of when reviewing a potential phishing communication include: 

Review the information of the sender and assess whether it is accurate.

• Does the email address look legitimate and match the claimed individual?
• Does all the personal information match throughout the communication?

Inspect any embedded links to other properties and review the URL strings.

• Does the URL point to the expected or suggested location?
• Long-winded or strange web addresses can be a sign of phishing attacks. 

Assess whether you were expecting the inbound contact

• Is the contact out of the blue and seemingly random?
• Is it on a topic you’re expecting, or does it seem unrelated to your role?

Are they asking you reasonable questions or making typical requests?

• Requests for any banking information, personal information, or business data need to be scrutinized heavily and are likely phishing attempt.s 

The more sophisticated the attack the harder it is to spot them. In some cases phishing attacks will even include personal information, such as job titles or colleague names, to further legitimize their claim. 

How Do Phishing Scams Affect Businesses?

As of Q3 2024, there are nearly 900,000 unique phishing sites active, and as many as 1.6 million sites active in 2023. Phishing scams are very common, with endless amounts of spam emails and text messages being fired at us daily. 

Entire business operations exist online and any vulnerability can topple the whole organization. Would you feel comfortable handing over the keys to your business accounts to a complete stranger? It could lead to someone having domain administrator access on an ecommerce platform, or direct access to bank accounts and financial data. 

The biggest risk of phishing to a business is a data breach — especially of their customer information. This can lead to a huge drop in customer trust, a massive reputational hit, and a long-term impact on profits. 

Despite the threat phishing and cybercrime poses to businesses globally, there are tools to combat the problem. Phishing simulation programs are a key weapon in the war on cybercrime - let’s see why. 

What is a Phishing Simulation Program?

A phishing simulation program creates safe environments for businesses and IT teams to experience phishing attacks without the risk of repercussions. Phishing simulations typically include sending fabricated phishing content to employees throughout a business in an effort to educate and make them aware of the process. This is most commonly done via email phishing attack vectors but is also found via text, social media messaging, phone calls, and more. 

The specifics of the program will differ from business to business and will depend heavily on your corporate structure and the general awareness of your colleagues. 

How can phishing simulations support cybersecurity efforts?

Fundamentally, simulations will impart additional awareness to colleagues in your business about the dangers and warning signs of a phishing scam. This helps create a risk management process for your team and will reduce the number of successful phishing attacks within your company, safeguarding important assets. 

Despite phishing being around for decades at this stage, many individuals have no idea what it means, let alone what to look for. Phishing simulations provide that first-hand experience in a safe and secure environment. 

Designing a Phishing Simulations Program for Your Workforce

Whether this is your first foray into cybercrime training or your business routinely engages in training, following these steps should help create a phishing simulation program that challenges and trains your workforce. 

Just remember, different businesses will have different styles of cyber threat to worry about — a financial firm will be targeted differently to a media organization, for instance. Make sure your simulation suits you, in order to most accurately reflect the threats your teams might face.

1. Assess your current status.

No business is completely protected from cybercrime and phishing attacks. Your readiness to deal with phishing scams will determine where you are starting from when constructing your phishing simulation strategy. 

Assess which areas of the business are most at risk of attacks, who in the business has the most valuable data to be stolen, and what attack vectors exist to be taken advantage of. Look at where you’ve provided training, and where you haven’t. All of these factors help to mould your strategy and inform how your simulations operate.

2. Create programs for common types of phishing attacks

Once you’ve established the areas of weakness within your business structure, it’s time to design the programs you’ll use to simulate attacks. A phishing simulation can be modified in numerous ways: 

1. The volume of attacks
2. Which areas of the business are targeted
3. The timeframe for a simulation to occur in
4. Whether your team is notified in advance 
5. Which types of attack vectors are used - email, text, etc. 
6. The data collected

Instead of trying to make a one-size-fits-all program, it’s advisable to focus on smaller more focused simulations that have a specific goal or training intention in mind. In many instances, these nuanced programs will help your team learn more effectively. 

3. Leverage data collection and analysis

One of the biggest assets in cybersecurity is machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. The data you can gather as part of a phishing simulation is valuable. Analyze this data using ML or analytics tools to understand your network’s vulnerabilities and phishing susceptibility. Analyze this data using ML or analytics tools to understand your network’s vulnerabilities and phishing susceptibility. 

These tools can quickly identify which types of phishing attacks were more successful, and who was most likely to fall for them. You might notice particular patterns — perhaps employees who were onboarded within the last two years are better trained than those before that, or perhaps certain age groups tend to be more trusting of what is emailed to them. This information can help shape your automated filtering rules, as well as provide guidance on how to train your team. 

4. Invest in your team to build expertise.

While phishing simulation exercises do demand a non-trivial amount of time and resources to manage effectively, the knowledge gained is invaluable. There’s no better substitute for hands-on experience and a phishing simulation puts your employees directly into the situation. 

It’s important to recognize that the goal is not to single out and reprimand anyone who falls victim to the simulated phishing attacks. Instead, these events should be used as a wider training tool to analyze how the attack succeeded and what could be done to avoid it next time. 

As well as running targeted training sessions, consider updating your internal knowledge base to contain helpful information. Having the answers to questions like ‘how do you verify a phone number?’, ‘what email domains are legitimate?’, and ‘what should I do if I think this email is a scam?’ easily accessible can help employees avoid potential threats.  

The Next Steps

The unfortunate truth is that phishing attacks aren’t going away. The world of cybercrime will only continue to advance in the maturity of the attacks. Businesses need to continually evolve their cybersecurity efforts to stay one step ahead, protect valuable assets, and ensure operational resilience. 

Phishing simulations are a stellar asset to give your entire team hands-on experience with phishing scams, reducing the likelihood that they’ll fall victim to the attack. They’re not a silver bullet to remove the chance completely, but will dramatically bolster your security and prepare your business for future attacks. Cybercrime isn’t going away, but with the right training, your people won’t be caught off guard.

Train often. Simulate smarter. Stay one step ahead.