Cofense Email Security

Why Phishing Training Needs to Be Comprehensive

What is Phishing Training?

Phishing training is a form of cybersecurity education used to teach employees how to recognize and avoid malicious attempts from hackers.

It is important for any organization, as it helps protect against data breaches, compromised login credentials, and other cyber-attacks.

Comprehensive Phishing Awareness Training

By itself, the term phishing training fails to convey the complexity of creating and maintaining an effective defense against email-borne threats. Yes, it’s important to provide security awareness training and educate employees on the risks of clicking on malicious links, opening infected attachments or divulging confidential information in an email, but the best phishing training involves much more.

For example, you need processes for reporting phishing or suspicious emails, along with mechanisms to help security teams prioritize reports. 

Think about it: after employees receive phishing training, they’re likely to report more emails. To manage the volume of phishing reports and contain genuine threats, security teams need to know which employees are best at spotting potential threats.

The hardest part of phishing training is building a business culture of openness and awareness. 

Mistakes happen. 

When an employee inadvertently responds to a phishing email, it’s smart to educate and correct. If employees feel shame, they may be reluctant to report errors in the future, denying security teams the chance to contain threats fast. Given the potential consequences of an uncontained threat, phishing training needs to include everyone from the CEO down.

Phishing Training for Employees

Investing in phishing training for employees can be an effective solution to improve the overall security of an organization. The training can equip employees with the knowledge they need to recognize phishing emails, avoid clicking on malicious links or downloading harmful attachments.

Cybercriminals use many tactics to gather the information needed for phishing attacks. Employees and senior management need to be vigilant. Besides learning how to identify suspicious emails, they must also learn how social engineering attacks are constructed, plus the risks of surfing the web from a mobile device connected to the business´s network.

It’s not enough to send phishing awareness emails to employees. Employees need security awareness training and simulated phishing campaigns that assess and measure their susceptibility to phishing attacks. The results of phishing training for employees show weaknesses in network defenses. Security teams can use this knowledge to prioritize suspicious email reports. A culture of awareness, and one of action, is the goal.

Relevance counts, too. Lower-level employees need to be aware of phishing email threats, but are unlikely to be targets of a business email compromise attack. It’s vital for phishing training to be customizable—relevant to different user groups and the roles they play in your online defense. Without relevance, users become disinterested and phishing training less effective.

Comprehensive Phishing Training from Cofense

Our phishing training is holistic. Through customizable security awareness training and simulated phishing campaigns, your employees will be less susceptible to costly phishing attacks. Our phishing simulator campaigns can be designed to use real-world, phishing attack scenarios that target your organization, industry or a specific department. Employees can also report and delete suspicious emails with the click of a button. Incident responders can triage reported emails, prioritize and reduce false positives. 

Our human-vetted, phishing-specific threat intelligence service further helps security teams work smarter, with better results. The platform integrates seamlessly with existing security information and event management systems. It’s easy to administer and provides deep metrics, benchmarking and reporting options.

Rounding out our security awareness training, we offer computer-based modules that you can use as stand-alone instruments or as part of our integrated package. We also host a thriving online community where businesses share their experiences and solutions. Be sure to explore our free videos, webinars, and whitepapers with information relevant to all industry sectors.

Request a free demo of Cofense in action

Or contact us with questions about maximizing the effectiveness of your phishing training. Fortify your last line of defense against malware, data loss, and ransomware. Cofense has helped our clients achieve a 95% reduction in susceptibility to phishing emails. Is your current phishing training that good? Learn more today!

Phishing Training Cost

Cofense offers bundled and free solutions that deliver key capabilities to any size business. To stop rapidly evolving phishing attacks, you need more than a layered defense. You need the right layers. When users act as human sensors, they supply valuable intelligence to security operations teams, giving them the visibility to neutralize threats faster.

Stop Phishing Attacks in as Little as 20 Minutes

100% of the phish Cofense finds in customers’ environments were reported by users. 0% were stopped by perimeter technology. When secure email gateways fail, users are your last line of defense. Cofense intelligent phishing defense equips your teams to find, report, respond to and neutralize phishing threats by fusing human intelligence and advanced technology. Learn More

Phishing Webinars that Help Protect Your Organization

Access our past phishing webinars and see upcoming PhishMe webinars on topics ranging from social media and human sensors to malware and security awareness. Learn More

Interested in learning more about phishing detection and response?

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