Phishing Simulation Tool

Phishing is a cybercrime tactic in which a target or targets are contacted by email, telephone, or text message by someone posing as a supposedly legitimate contact. Interacting with a phishing email can infect your computer and/or network with things like malware or ransomware, as well as open you up to potentially stolen login credentials, personal information, or money.

Even with enterprise-grade email and spam filtering solutions, phishing emails are nearly impossible to completely prevent from landing in your employees’ inboxes.

Threat actors are constantly evolving their methods to avoid detection and subvert protection measures.

While you may not be able to stop the attacks, you can take steps to develop a comprehensive employee training program to educate employees on how to identify and respond to phishing attempts. In the event that human error trumps your preventive strategy, you can leverage detection and response technology as another line of defense.

Standard phishing emails are more generic and cast a wide net, looking for anyone who might respond (think of an imitated FedEx delivery notice or Microsoft notification).

Spear phishing is a campaign that a cyber attacker purposefully built to penetrate one specific organization and they will spend time researching names and roles within a company.

They will include real facts and details in an attempt to make the attack more convincing for the recipient.

While regular phishing campaigns go after large numbers of relatively low-yield targets, spear-phishing aims at specific targets using specialty emails crafted to their intended victim.

Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent message purporting to be from a trusted sender, in order to trick the recipient into providing sensitive information or parting with something of value.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a specific type of phishing attack designed to impersonate or compromise an executive’s email to defraud the company.

Most BEC attacks include a phishing component, however not all phishing emails are part of targeted BEC attacks.

The goal of BEC attacks is typically to coerce an employee into sending a wire transfer, modifying payment instructions, or providing sensitive information (such as payroll, wage or tax information).

This scam is attempted so frequently that we wrote a Complete Guide to the CEO Fraud Business Email Compromise.

The most straightforward way to spot a phish is to be wary of any email, text message, phone call, or any other communication that you did not initiate and were not expecting.

Our webinar Tips to Spoil Advanced Phishing Attempts walks you through more detail including tactics, emotions preyed upon and other guidance on staying vigilant.

We have recommendations on how to confirm legitimacy, such as reaching out to the purported sender (through a different communication method, such as a phone call, messaging app or directly visiting the website) and verifying the authenticity of the link or request.