Key Takeaways

• Phishing is a Threat to SMBs: Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are common targets for phishing attacks, making employee training essential.
• Routine Simulations Build Resilience: Regular phishing simulations help employees recognize and respond to phishing attempts, reducing the risk of successful attacks.
• Effective Training is Key: Engaging, challenging, and regular phishing simulations significantly improve employees’ ability to spot and report phishing attempts.

Can you spot a phishing email?

Hopefully, the answer is “yes,” but things become more complex for enterprises with thousands of employees.

Data taken from the 2023 Gone Phishing Tournament found that 10.3% of organizations with 10,000 or more employees are likely to click on a phishing email link.

That’s about 1,000 employees on average who are clicking on malicious links, unknowingly leaking sensitive data into the hands of attackers. The frustrating part is that it could have been easily prevented by conducting routine phishing simulations.

In this blog, we’ll explore the main benefits of performing routine phishing simulations and how you can avoid becoming the target of a sophisticated phishing attack.

Why Are Phishing Simulations So Important

A phishing simulation is a cybersecurity exercise that involves sending realistic phishing emails and scenarios to test employees’ ability to recognize and respond to potential phishing attacks.

Without phishing training and awareness, a potentially harmful email can easily bypass all spam filters and wind up in an employee’s inbox. Even worse is that it won’t get reported to the IT team either. A study found that only 18.3% of emails sent as part of phishing simulations were properly reported by users.

Not exactly reassuring.

Phishing simulations help educate employees on how to identify and report suspicious emails effectively. That means not hesitating to notify IT the instant a suspicious-looking email hits their inbox. And that happens quite often, despite having spam filters and advanced security tools. Even the most well-trained employees can miss all the warning signs. It takes only a matter of seconds to get distracted and click on a malicious file attachment that looks like it came from a legitimate source, especially if the email text language mimics someone familiar within the organization. Malicious LLMs give attackers an advantage.

AI-generated phishing attacks have added a new level of complexity to the game. Research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to AI-automated phishing, further noting that the entire phishing process can be automated using LLMs, which reduces the costs of phishing attacks by more than 95% while achieving equal or greater success rates.

Conducting routine phishing simulations can help minimize the risks of those attacks.

How Does a Phishing Simulation Work?

Phishing simulations typically provide a wide range of pre-built templates that mimic real-world phishing attacks. The simulations then quiz the employees on how well they can identify suspicious emails based on the actions taken. Audiences can be segmented by departments or by specific users and scheduled by time or date.

Key metrics to pay close attention to include:

• Open rates
• CTR
• Failure rates
• Attachment opening rate
• Click-to-report ratio
• Improvement rate

Invest the time to train the employees who miss these critical red flags:

• Anyone who forwards the phishing email to colleagues
• Anyone who opens a file attachment
• Not reporting the phishing attempt

Retest employees after several months and note any improvements. If the overall collective team score is low, consider improving your security awareness programs. Take a step back and reevaluate existing security policies and protocols. Are policies outdated? Do they properly address phishing tactics and other forms of social engineering?

Now would be a good time to update your policies and guidelines.

4 Effective Ways to Implement Phishing Simulations

Frequency: How often do you plan on testing your employees? Hopefully, not every three days or so. Phishing simulations should be run on a monthly or quarterly basis. Alternate the phishing templates to keep tests fresh and challenging. This ensures that employees are continually exposed to different types of phishing attempts.

Avoid predictability. Don’t send the emails out at the same each day. It’s important to randomize the timing intervals of the simulations to keep employees on their guard. It also encourages them to remain alert to phishing attempts at all times.

Introduce gamification: Phishing simulations should not feel like mandatory company obligations or forced security tests that employees dread completing. One way to make phishing simulations more engaging and exciting is via gamification.

Gamification keeps things fun and challenging. Create leaderboards with points and badges and award prizes to those who complete the simulations fastest with minimal to no errors. Gamification also helps boost productivity in the workforce as it keeps everyone motivated and incentivized. A lot of winning all around, literally.

Increase the level of difficulty: Go beyond the basics. Shift the challenge into second gear by creating targeted emails that appear to come from C-level executives or specific departments, also known as spear phishing. Why is this important? Spear phishing campaigns have an average click rate of 53.2%, significantly increasing the data breach risk.

Do you need to step the difficulty up another level? Simulate multi-stage phishing attacks, which involve a series of deceptive emails that gradually build trust with the recipient before delivering a malicious payload. If your employees can spot those types of phishing attempts, they have achieved Jedi-level phishing awareness.

Post-simulation training: What have your employees learned from the simulations? Can they recall how to spot a fake login page, or will they enter their credentials without hesitation? Post-simulation training is important for following up with employees long after they’ve completed the required test. This gives you the ability to monitor and track performance over time.

Create helpful materials and guidelines on phishing and social engineering that everyone can follow in simplistic language. Infographics work well. They are more digestible than a 50-page PDF as they visually summarize the technical details and highlight the key points.

And there you have it.

4 simple ways to implement phishing simulations into your organization. Whether you manage a team of 30 or run multiple enterprise accounts of over 10,000 employees, everyone should be well-educated on the topic of phishing.

Prevent Phishing Attacks in Advance with Guardz

Don’t wait until someone clicks on a real phishing URL. Take proactive security measures with Guardz Phishing Simulation.

Guardz leverages AI and LLMs to generate realistic phishing scenarios and personalized email templates within a few seconds.

Here’s how the simulation works. Simply choose a template and click “Assign” once you’re satisfied. You can also set the filters by a specific audience or set preferences based on industries for even more precise campaign targeting. Guardz will then send you a detailed summary once the simulation is completed.

Safeguard your employees and critical assets from phishing attacks with Guardz.

Your MSP clients’ cybersecurity posture is only as strong as your weakest link. The question is, do you know where your weakest link is?

Is it an unsecured endpoint that a third-party vendor has access to?

How about those unfamiliar SaaS apps your remote team is using without IT approval? 

Or maybe it’s that unpatched software quietly running on a server you haven’t checked in months?

A single high-risk vulnerability can give an attacker everything they need to infiltrate your network. What you have on your hands is a potential breach in the making. In this blog, we’ll break down 5 common ways cybercriminals gain unauthorized access to your network and how you can prevent them. Ready? Let’s go.

5 Common Ways Cybercriminals Gain Unauthorized Access to Your Network

1. Phishing attacks: Do your employees know how to properly spot a fake email? Not according to data taken from Fortra’s 2023 Gone Phishing Tournament. The study revealed that 33.2% of untrained end users will fail a phishing test. Things get even uglier for remote workers. Research found that 47% of employees cited distraction as the reason for falling for a phishing scam while working from home. Phishing attacks are becoming tougher to detect every day. Without advanced email security and training, your employees could accidentally open a malicious URL or give away sensitive PII data by replying to the scammer’s email. Not ideal.

How to prevent it: Conduct routine phishing simulations and invest in employee training. Ensure that all employees are well-trained in spotting suspicious-looking emails, URLs, and file attachments. Encourage them to raise a red flag if they suspect something “phishy” because it can help spare your organization from a costly phishing attack.

Have I Been Pwned is a great resource that lets you check if your email has been compromised for free.

2. Compromised passwords: Are your employees still writing down their passwords on sticky notes? Do they use weak passwords such as “123456” or their birthdays which can be cracked with a brute force attack in a matter of seconds?

There’s also a very good chance your employees might be reusing the same password to access multiple accounts, both for work and personal use. Kaspersky analyzed over 32 million emails and found that only 23% of passwords are strong enough to resist hackers. Compromised passwords can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive systems and applications. Attackers can also leverage reused passwords to escalate privileges and move laterally within your network, causing further damage.

How to prevent it: Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) and enforce strong password policies across the organization. Go over security protocols and ensure that all employees understand best practices, such as increasing the level of difficulty of their passwords and using a mix of both letters and numbers that exceed 16 characters. Require password changes every 60-90 days. And if you see any sticky notes or pieces of paper with passwords on someone’s desk, shred them!

3. Excessive permissions: When was the last time you checked user permissions? A month ago? 3 months? Longer? Excessive permissions pose a serious security risk. Privilege creep refers to the gradual accumulation of network access levels beyond what an individual needs to perform their job.

For instance, it wouldn’t make much sense for someone in HR to have access to cloud databases or be set up as an AWS cloud user. Employees and third parties who are no longer with the company must have their permission sets revoked immediately. Don’t let those stale accounts linger. Excessive permissions can lead to account hijacking and unauthorized network access. You know what usually comes next, right? A headline-worthy data breach. No one needs that.

How to prevent it: Conduct a regular access permission inventory across all of your accounts to minimize the threat surface. Revoke access for inactive accounts the second an employee leaves the company or when your contract ends with a third-party vendor or supplier. If an employee changes roles, they should be granted temporary access and permissions during the transition period to ensure that they have access only to what is needed and nothing more.

4. Unsecured endpoints: Data taken from Verizon showed that 90% of successful cyberattacks and as many as 70% of successful data breaches originate at endpoint devices. The question your IT team needs to answer is which devices are connected to the company network from a personal laptop or iPhone?

A single compromised endpoint can serve as a point of entry and give an attacker carte blanche to wreak havoc over your network. But this is where the real security concern begins. Do you know which devices are being managed and which are flying under the radar waiting to be compromised? Something as small as a USB drive that is either lost or stolen can cause a massive breach.

How to prevent it: Perform device posture checks to verify that all devices accessing the network meet security policies. This is especially important for enforcing BYOD policies for remote workers accessing the company network from personal devices. You should also conduct a thorough cyber risk assessment to identify potential vulnerabilities related to endpoint devices and ensure that security measures are in place to address them.

5. Shadow IT: Did you authorize that new cloud app, or better yet, do you even know about it? Shadow IT presents a real security threat for organizations. Without visibility into these unapproved apps, sensitive information might get leaked, resulting in data loss and other security risks.

A study by Capterra found that 57% of SMBs have had high-impact shadow IT efforts occur outside the purview of their official IT department. Let’s face it, IT professionals certainly have their work cut out for them, but if they don’t have a clear understanding of all the tools and applications in use, their ability to enforce security policies and protect sensitive data is severely compromised. The introduction of more unknown apps to the network translates into more security gaps that could be exploited by malicious actors.

How to prevent it: Implement DLP tools to monitor, detect, and block the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data through unsanctioned apps. This will help ensure that even if shadow IT applications are being used, the risk of data leakage is greatly minimized.

Prevent Unauthorized Network Access with Guardz Cloud Data Protection

Keep malicious actors and critical assets out of your network with Guardz Cloud Data Protection. Guardz helps prevent data exposure by scanning cloud accounts for excessive permissions, inactive users, risky cloud misconfigurations, and any suspicious user behavior through advanced machine learning capabilities.

Guardz helps prevent data exfiltration and alerts your IT team once an incident has been identified so you can apply the necessary security policies immediately. Streamline cloud data protection and permission visibility with Guardz.