Intro
Don’t think that you”re invincible to phishing; everyone can fall victim to phishing attacks.
Phishing, in general, is the most common form of cyber attack today, with a couple of billion emails sent every day. Even though phishing might look like a really simple cyber attack method, it still manages to be effective, allowing hackers to bypass security measures and hack into devices and networks.
So today, we’ll look into ways how you can protect yourself, your workplace, your infrastructure, and your employees from phishing attacks. But first, let’s see how phishing hacks human behavior and what makes all of click on these shady links.
How Phishing Hacks Human Behavior
Did you know that Microsoft is the number 1 imitated organization when it comes to phishing emails?
It doesn’t take much for a phishing attack to work; one click on a link you shouldn’t have is all it takes for threat actors to breach your security. One of the tactics threat actors use is to create false time pressure. This can trigger our urgency bias and cause people to act without ensuring that the email that they just received isn’t a cyber attack in disguise.
Another tactic is to imitate a leader in the organization such as the CEO who your employee would inherently trust. The bigger the trust level, the easier it is to manipulate.
Employees need to go through comprehensive phishing training in order to defend against malicious actions like these. The training will help your employees not fall for these attacks and prevent harm to your entire organization.
3 ways to Incorporate Phishing Training in your Workplace
Did you know that there was a 61% increase in the rate of phishing attacks in 2022 when compared to 2021? Cyber attacks are on the rise and it’s your job to learn how to defend from them.
Additionally, relying on multi-factor authentication or IT security barriers is no only enough. Organizations need to be proactive and stay up-to-date with the latest security measures. One of the ways you can ensure your employees are also up-to-date is to use an intranet.
An intranet can offer a centralized location to employees about the latest phishing scams as well as a place to report any scams they have received. It is also a secure board for notifications and announcements. So if a threat actor tries to imitate an email announcement from the IT department, your employees can check its credibility by cross referencing the intranet.
With that in mind, here are 3 steps how you can train your employees not to fall victim to phishing:
- Assessing the current state of cybersecurity. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know where the exact problem is. The first is to assess your employees’ baseline awareness regarding cybersecurity. The best way to do so is to have a cyber attack simulation and see how your employees will react to it. Don’t bash your employees who fail the test; take it as a learning opportunity and ensure that these breaches don’t happen when a real attack happens.
- Evaluate results and create a phishing training program. Once you have the results of the simulation, you should look at the weak points and bottlenecks in both your infrastructure and your employees’ education level. Then, create a learning program where you’ll address these specific points to ensure that your employees learn from them and not repeat them.
- Repeat the simulation to see if your employees learned to defend from the attack. You should always repeat simulations to see how well your employees absorbed the training and if they’ll change their actions for better results. The best time to repeat a simulation isn’t immediately after the training, but a couple of months later to see what stuck around for them. Don’t limit yourself to one test or simulation a year; have them at regular intervals in your organization to ensure you’re ready when the real thing happens. Pilots do this before every flight and even though nothing happens in most cases, it’s super useful when an actual problem really happens.
Conclusion
If you’re still unsure of how to prepare your employees for a phishing attack, check out our webinar on using a single source of truth to mitigate the risks of Phishing. In it, cyber security experts from KnowBe4 and Nucleus Networks share insights on how centralized information systems can mitigate phishing attempts.
