What is a Phishing Simulation?

Keepnet Labs
2 min readJun 11, 2021

What is a Phishing Simulation — Phishing simulations are used to train your staff to detect warning signs of malicious email. A security company that offers phishing simulations creates a series of fake phishing emails tailored to your organization. Fake phishing emails can be fake emails, but they closely mimic real phishing emails.

A proper phishing simulation program will be automated to reduce your input and improve the authenticity of the simulation. Typically, you run the simulation service regularly and modify it to reflect current scams. The software running the simulation sends pre-configured phishing emails to employees to test their responses. These emails can be customized to the company, department, or even person. Exercises are tracked, and the results show the effectiveness of the exercises. You can use these results to further customize the sessions to improve them. The ultimate goal is to train employees to ascertain whether an email is legitimate or not.

Why Should You Experience a Phishing Simulation?

As businesses continue to implement anti-phishing strategies and educate their employees on cybersecurity, cybercriminals continue to improve phishing attacks and develop new scams. Designed to deceive employees, these evolving and sophisticated hacking techniques put your business at risk of data loss, financial fraud, and embarrassing exposure. Phishing simulation protects your organization by helping to stop potentially devastating attacks that can pass through security gateways.

Why Phishing Simulation is Essential

Cybersecurity awareness training from different channels may not be effective against cyber attacks. Especially for reasons like lack of concentration, thinking about something else during training, carelessness, etc., maximum efficiency cannot be achieved in classical awareness programs.

However, using a phishing simulation, you can view and experience fake pages and emails like they are coming from a real cyber attacker. This way, you can detect fraudulent emails and find out what to watch out for. In addition, what should be observed on the fake website is personally experienced. For this reason, phishing attack simulation produces more efficient results than classical training.

Conclusion

Cybercriminals implement the best strategies for accessing your organization’s sensitive data. Often they attack with simple methods rather than complex methods — an attacker attacks by manipulating an employee or a community member. Using a phishing simulation like Keepnet Labs Phishing Simulator provides you to detect your company’s human vulnerabilities. But detecting vulnerabilities without fixing them usually means not much. With Keepnet Labs’s Awareness Educator, you can funnel your employees who are caught by phishing simulations into appropriate and engaging e-learning courses, ensuring they become more aware of threats and better-equipped to identify sophisticated phishing emails in the future.

Author: Hector
Cyber Security Researcher

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Keepnet Labs

Keepnet is an anti phishing solution and cybersecurity awareness training platform