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 cyberattack 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 steal critical information or credentials to gain access to your systems.

This blog will discuss the importance of phishing simulations and how they can help your business combat the social engineering attacks it must be aware of.

What are Phishing Simulations?

Phishing simulations are imitations of 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.

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

After all, phishing attacks are designed to be indistinguishable from actual attacks. They exist to prey on the uneducated, so it’s vital to ensure that everyone in your company is educated.

Why Phishing Simulations Are Essential

Phishing simulations ensure employees don’t fall victim to phishing attacks. They provide a safe environment to teach your employees how to detect and avoid phishing attacks while being immersive and realistic, meaning that they showcase 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, this will create 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 it is paramount to ensure everyone knows the thorough steps to take when checking communications.

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

• Improve Employee Awareness: Employee awareness is vital for combating phishing and social engineering attacks. Keeping everyone informed and updated 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 when some are already savvy enough to avoid these attacks, you can use phishing tests to find the people more likely to fall victim.
• Real-World Preparedness: Nothing is better than real-world experience and examples of attacks that you can face. Theory only takes you so far, so training in real-world scenarios means your employees can see a real example of what they’ll face.
• Build a Security-Conscious Culture: Security is vital in the modern day, 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.

Using phishing simulations to train your employees to be aware of social engineering attacks will help them proactively detect phishing attempts 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, regarding training, the experience provided by phishing simulations is second to none.

Common Challenges and Solutions

While phishing simulations are excellent, 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 phishing tests will hinder your employees and make the tests less effective. Like a fire drill, a high frequency risks people taking actual attacks less seriously. It’s essential 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 with this. It will take more time and planning, but it will ensure you get the most out of your tests.
• Punitive Measures: The goal is not to punish employees for failing these tests. Of course, repeated failure and negligence of security are different stories, but these tests are here to ensure everyone can protect themselves, so providing support is paramount.
• Neglecting Follow-Up: If you fail to follow up on your tests effectively, they will become ineffective. Providing support is vital, and ensuring 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 know how to spot them. By doing so, you can identify employees who are more likely to fall victim and support them directly.

Contact us today if you want to start phishing simulations but need assistance. We’re here to help and will ensure you have all the support you need for your simulations to succeed.

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