Phishing Training For Employees: Everything You Need To Know
Home / SafeTitan Security Awareness Training / Phishing Training For Employees: Everything You Need To KnowThe increasing dependency on technology from accessing information at your fingertips, smart home automation, digital banking, online e-commerce, the Internet of Things, and more, makes cybersecurity the need of the hour. Globally cybercrimes are expected to rise by 15 percent over the next few years and cost businesses $10.5 trillion in losses annually by 2025.
Among the five most common cyberattacks to wreak havoc in 2021, phishing (pronounced fishing) was considered a highly popular cybercrime, given its effectiveness. According to a 2021 Cybersecurity Threat Trends Report by CISCO, nearly 90% of data breaches can be attributed to phishing and 80% of reported security breaches that year were on account of phishing attacks.
Phishing involves the sending of fraudulent communications seemingly from a reliable source. It is mostly done through email to steal the victim’s money, identity, etc., by getting them to reveal sensitive information like credit card details, passwords, or bank information. At times, it is also used to install malware on the victim’s device.
IBM’s Cost of Data Breach Report 2021 estimated the costs to organizations from breaches due to phishing at approximately 4.65 million USD. The FBI reports a 400% year-on-year increase in phishing attacks. What’s concerning is that over 90% of these attacks on organizations happen through email.
Therefore, both big and small organizations must conduct phishing training for employees and create phishing security awareness.
Organizations need to understand that while their employees are their assets, they’re also their biggest vulnerability when it comes to recognizing and reporting phishing attempts. But before your employees can do that, they need to be made aware of phishing. With over 90,000 phishing campaigns being launched every month, phishing training for employees is the need of the hour.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) or in-house IT managers charged with protecting their clients and companies' businesses would agree that no amount of technical measures is 100% effective in blocking phishing attacks. Phishing awareness across all levels of the organization will instead be more effective in preventing phishing attacks.
Phishing security awareness training involves educating employees and empowering them to spot and report questionable or dubious emails with malicious intent. Awareness is the best form of defense, and it involves knowing what to look for.
User education is key to protecting your organization or business from phishing. Depending on the number of employees in the organization, the initial phishing training for employees can be started with the help of a written document, online video, classroom training, or departmental meetings.
It’s important to include employees at all levels of the organization, including the high-level or senior management, as they are often the target. Employees should be trained to recognize phishing emails and the expected course of action should they receive one. Simulation exercises can be used to assess how they react to a staged phishing attack.
While there are several phishing techniques that hackers use, organizations and employees should be aware of the following:
Phishing often starts with fraudulent communication, usually via email or SMS, and is intended to lure the victim by impersonating a brand, the Microsoft 365 phishing attack being a famous example. Since it can have negative repercussions, any suspected phishing attempt should be immediately brought to the attention of the concerned department or personnel.
Penalties vary depending on the severity of the offense, and whether the hacker has a criminal history. If found guilty, they can be looking at serving a prison sentence, fines, or probation.
With technology improving by leaps and bounds, hackers aren’t far behind when it comes to the resources at their disposal. From composing clean emails in the language of their target victim and phishing emails with minute errors to support networks, they have everything it takes to disguise emails and do it well.
Employees will therefore need to read emails from external sources very carefully. They should also be instructed to look out for glaring grammatical and style issues during sessions on phishing training for employees that indicate the sender is not who they pretend to be.
Trademarks and logos do not guarantee that an email is authentic. One must remember that these are public information and can be easily downloaded or replicated. Hackers don’t stop at that. At times phishing emails may also contain antivirus badges to cement their legitimacy. Also, phishing URLs can be hidden in plain sight in QR codes or as malicious text on images.
Most times, a discerning eye is all that’s needed to spot the minute, telltale signs in a logo or a trademark that identify it as a phishing email.
All phishing emails typically contain a link, but they are deceptive and designed to take users to a page that looks almost like the real one. Also, beware of URLs ending with alternate domain names other than .com or .org., and be careful when clicking on shortened URLs.
It’s best to hover over any link in the email body to see what comes up. You can use IsItPhishing.AI to determine if an URL is legitimate or not.
We mentioned above that all phishing emails typically contain a link. But you need to be aware that they do not always have to be in the email body. Hackers have also started including such links in PDF or Word attachments to avoid detection.
Email spoofing is a technique used in phishing attacks where an email is manipulated to appear as if it originates from a trusted source. The common types are display name spoofing and cousin domains. In the former, the hacker uses a legitimate company name to show as the email sender — support@microsoft.com but the email beneath is a random address like abc@gmail.com. It is most effective on mobile devices since the sender’s email address is hidden, and most email users rarely expand the sender’s name to view the address.
Creating a sense of urgency, panic, or curiosity is common in phishing emails since users are always quick to respond to such emails. Phishing emails almost always use an aggressive tone or require immediate action to be taken, a technique often used to scare people into giving out their confidential information. It will help if employees are shown samples of such emails during phishing security awareness training.
In the past, phishing emails were often impersonal since they were sent out in bulk and addressed users with generic terms. However, using advanced technology, hackers today launch targeted attacks using the individual or business’s name in the subject line. They also use automation tools to pre-fill victims’ email addresses on the phishing webpage or load a company’s logo on the Microsoft 365 page, for example.
Cousin domains are slight alterations of legitimate email addresses. For example, a hacker might use Apple.co to spoof an Apple.com email, or use extensions like apple-support.net. Many phishing emails also resort to using lengthy and confusing subdomains.
Sign up for a FREE Demo of SafeTitan to learn how it works to train employees and protect your business in preventing phishing attacks.
Book Free DemoPrevention is always better than cure. Now that your team knows what to look out for in phishing emails, they can also take the following protective measures to ensure they secure the integrity of the organization’s data. Employees should:
If an employee has fallen prey to a phishing attack, here are a few things you can get them to do immediately:
Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly common, but dealing with the repercussions from one can be both costly and time-consuming for brands and businesses.Even if you have the most sophisticated security systems, one careless click or untrained employee is all it takes to compromise your network and compromise valuable data.
As mentioned before, any cybersecurity technology cannot completely prevent phishing attacks. Rather than focusing only on technology, companies should instead take a layered approach to mitigate phishing attacks or their impact if ever they do occur. Malware protection, web and email security, user behavior monitoring, access control, etc., are technologies that companies can look at implementing.
In addition, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and in-house IT managers can also implement the following measures for preventing phishing attacks.
TitanHQ’s SafeTitan Security Awareness Training includes both phishing awareness training and simulated tests. Our phishing awareness training program is designed to improve employee resilience and awareness through entertaining, engaging, and interactive content seamlessly and easily.
We also use authentic phishing emails in a protected or simulated environment to give your employees an improved perspective on the effectiveness of our phishing training program. More often than not, staff can’t tell a phishing email from a legitimate one. However, concerns such as this are addressable through our world-class security awareness training.
Be safe, not sorry. If you feel the need to empower your team with security awareness, contact TitanHQ. Our elite cyber experts will be happy to help you and your team learn how to protect your brand and secure your assets. Alternatively, sign up for a demo to learn more!
Sign up for a FREE Demo of SafeTitan to learn how it works to train employees and protect your business in preventing phishing attacks.
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