You might already have technology in place to protect your organization against phishing attacks – but this alone won’t stop threats getting through. Sophisticated phishing attacks can make it through the most secure email gateways and replicate normal email behavior extremely convincingly. Your people are the last line of defense your organization has between valuable data and malicious threat actors and so to protect your organization, you need a layered approach, with secure processes and people at its core.
What is a phishing simulation?
Phishing simulations are a cyber security exercise designed to raise security awareness by testing and educating your employees on how to spot and avoid a phishing email. It involves sending out a simulated phishing email to your employees to mimic a real attack and monitoring their responses.
A simulated phishing exercise gives you the opportunity to train and test your people on how to identify and report suspicious emails, links or attachments that land in their inbox. You can get a picture of your vulnerabilities, as well as raising security awareness and readiness.
Why is simulated phishing important?
Even with all the right protections in place, you can’t guarantee that a rogue email won’t make it to an employee’s inbox. That one email can be the biggest risk to your cyber security. With a simulated phishing exercise, you can teach your employees how to spot a phishing attack so they won’t fall victim to a real one.
Continuous testing with simulated phishing exercises can help you:
- Prevent data breaches
- Monitor your attack rate
- Ensure your people have security awareness
Take steps to meet new cyber insurance requirements
Ensuring security awareness is not only important for your overall cyber security protection, but it’s also becoming an essential in regulatory and insurance compliance.
Insurance companies are changing their approach, recognizing that the user can be the biggest risk when it comes to phishing attacks. Even if you have all the cyber essentials in place, there is now a requirement for security awareness training – and it comes with the benefit of lowering your insurance premiums.