How to secure your organization through phishing campaigns?

First of all, you have to figure out the ways you are protecting your organization and how to improve it. One of the ways I’d like to focus on but companies and employees less care about and really important is email security.

People outside of your organization can send phishing email to one of your employees and introduce a DDoS attack, or steals user credentials or install ransomware asking for money, when the employee clicks on the link in the email, thereby bringing down the entire network of your organization. This will cost a lot of revenue loss for the company.

If you have heard of how ransomware that has infected many organizations like NHS and other organizations last year, tells us about how important cybersecurity is for your organization. If not, it’s high time to think about it.

So the question is how can you secure your organization from phishing attacks?

The answer is by creating a phishing campaign and analyze your users behavior on emails usage. Below you can see how to create and test a phishing campaign.

Create and test a email phishing campaign (with your organization’s permission)

The first thing to do is create, send and test a phishing campaign to the users in your organization and notice how many users have opened the email and are likely to click on the link. This would be an effective step to alert your employees about phishing emails and its importance and how they can stay safe about it. Here you are also analyzing the ways your employees can get tricked and attacked and alerting them to be safe.

So how to create a phishing campaign for free and get results in real time?

We can create a email phishing campaign for free using a Gophish open source phishing framework that you can use to create and test it in your organization and analyze the users activity.(I’ll also share about how to create a campaign in the next series of posts).

So how could users and employees believe if the email is a genuine email and not a phishing email?

1. Check whether you have requested that information, such as password reset etc. If not, this is a phishing email.
2. Check the contents of the email for misspelled words. If not, still there’s chance that the attacker has put caution in creating the email.
3. Check whether the sender of the email, is someone you know or a service that you use. If not, there’s something wrong and you need to take care about how your email is used and for what services are you signing up for. Ask yourself the question: Did I sign up for this service?
4. Check the email address of the sender, do you feel it legitimate? Do you feel that it has been sent from a trusted sender, or a sender that you know?

Are these steps still enough, NO…. they are not.

Still phishing emails can still seem to be from a legitimate source but is still a real phishing email. How is that possible? Because everything seems to be legitimate at work especially since we are surrounded with tight deadlines and we care less about the links we click about, and all we care about is getting the work done. This leads to so many consequences for the organization itself even if one of the employers clicks on the phishing email and an attacker can bring down an entire network.

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If you would to know on how to train your employees and explain the importance of detecting phishing emails, I also wrote an article that will give you a clear idea on that as well.

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