Getting the Right Phishing Awareness Strategy Can Save Your Business From Major Headaches

As time goes on, businesses are doing more and more to protect their digital assets from theft and corruption. Whether that is deploying tools, providing training, or getting the support you need to successfully secure your business from the myriad of threats coming your way, you need to be deliberate about the way you go about deploying your security resources. Today, we want to touch on security training and the role it plays in your cybersecurity. 

Phishing Is a Major Problem

The way hackers go about infiltrating business computing infrastructure has changed quite a bit over the past decades. At one time, hackers would try to directly attack your business by trying to break into your network. Today, with all security tools getting stronger and proactively securing networks against direct attacks, social engineering has become the predominant way that these hackers gain access to your network.

Phishing is the act of hackers sending seemingly legitimate messages to your employees, sometimes even using your likeness, to get them to impulsively interact with the message and provide access onto your network. This may seem like it’s not totally believable, but over 90 percent of today’s account hacks that result in data breaches or ransomware deployments are the result of successful phishing attacks. 

There are plenty of warning signs you can use to identify a phishing attack. Here is a short list:

• A tone that doesn’t match the supposed sender
• Misspellings and other discrepancies in key details, like email addresses, domain names, and links
• Out-of-the-blue messages
• Egregious spelling and grammar errors
• Unexpected or out-of-context attachments
• Excessive urgency behind, or open threats as a consequence of, not complying with the message
• Ambiguous messages that motivate the recipient to investigate
• Unusual requests, or requests for explicitly sensitive information

Training Your Employees

Since the results of a successful phishing attack are pretty dire it’s crucial that your organization has a plan in place to train your staff on the issue. If they are better equipped to stop a phishing attack before it gets to a place of no return, it can go a long way toward improving organizational cybersecurity. 

Training can take any number of approaches. It can be more passive with videos that your employees have to watch, and it can be quite aggressive with test phishing messages sent to their inbox frequently that actively test their competence in avoiding and reporting potential phishing messages. Most training platforms have some interactive workshops equipped with hands-on training exercises.

One of these will most assuredly help improve employee awareness of phishing, but you really need to explain to them the dangers that phishing poses. If you would like help formulating a phishing awareness and training strategy for your business, give iTSTL a call today at (314)828-1234.