Phishing Awareness Training For Your Employees
Business breaches are regularly in the news and many organizations are taking steps to secure their business. While this is laudable, a big part of the attack, employee’s vulnerability, is often left unattended even though it contributes a lot to successful attacks.
Cyber attackers are aware of this situation and are massively exploiting employees in order to get to their target business. Through phishing and social engineering, hackers are breaching businesses to steal money and business secrets. Phishing awareness training helps prepare your employees to be resilient against phishing attacks. It helps them identify and spot attack attempts and equip them with the knowledge of how to react.
Why You Need Phishing Awareness Training
Phishing attacks have become more sophisticated and widespread that simple tips on how to recognize phishing emails are insufficient to counter the threats posed to business. Scammers go through a lot to acquire detailed information about their victims such as Date of Births, hobbies and even weekend plans!
When such levels of information are obtained, it becomes much harder to separate genuine communication from counterfeits.
Moreover, technical and advanced software are inadequate in combating well-crafted phishing attacks, the solution lies with phishing awareness training.
What is Phishing Awareness Training?
Phishing awareness training helps employees to spot and report phishing attempts in order to protect themselves and the organization from cybercriminals. The training helps to condition employees towards phishing attacks so they are more proactive in mitigating such attacks.
For phishing awareness training to work, it must be more than just reeling out facts about phishing. Detailed information and also easy to use tools must be deployed for employees to quickly report suspected phishers.
The training must also be repeated at a regular interval with new defense techniques added to prime employees to phishing attacks.
When designing the training for your employees, timely and constructive feedback should be included as a core feature. This will enhance and speed up the learning process.
Finally, the training should be gauged on their effectiveness by monitoring progress made. Based on the training results, new techniques and methods should be adopted to make it more effective for your employee.
Benefits of Phishing Awareness Training
Aside from the main benefit of the training to business which is improved security. The awareness program has a lot to offer employees too.
The social engineering aspect of the training helps employees to become more aware of potential sources and consequences of information leaks online.
As employees adopt changes for security reasons, they will be more protected against malware and potential identity theft which can be devastating in both social and crime ways.
They will be more discreet so as to protect their personal information which can be used against their employers and also for personal attacks.
An informed employee will contribute to a safe and secure working environment.
What Should be Included in the Training?
- Fundamental Training
This may include videos, reports, documents and memos about the generality of phishing attacks and how they can affect the organization’s and employees’ careers. Different methods may be combined as you see fit.
It gets employees up to date with what the threat is about.
- Simulated Phishing Training
Nothing compares with actual experience of a phishing attack. However, training via simulation can have a similar effect and deliver valuable lessons on phishing and the proper response.
Your employees will get to see how phishing emails are crafted to circumvent organization security. Through simulation, employees can understand phishing risks better.
- Try Multiple Scenarios
It is not enough to focus on the most popular attacks only. Phishing training should also include creative scams and imagined attack possibilities. An appropriate framework should be developed for identifying and stopping such hack attempts.
- Create Standard Report Procedure
What happens if your employees detect a phishing attempt?
Don’t leave the answer to guesswork or individual discretion.
The step by step procedure for handling such a threat must be spelled out in a formal document that should be part of your awareness training.
While your employees help your business succeed, they can also be a source of security compromise. Improve your business security by implementing phishing awareness training for your employees. Contact us today to learn more about how to add phishing awareness training to your organization.
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