Phishing Defense Training

What is Phishing Training

Broadly speaking, phishing training for your employees involves teaching them how to recognize and report suspected phishing emails BEFORE they interact with them. General reminders like announcements at department meetings to remind employees not to open suspicious attachments is not what we mean, but that’s where many organizations start and stop.

To truly condition employees to recognize real phishing emails, you must:

• Send simulated phishing emails based on common and emerging threats
• Record user actions to measure susceptibility
• Continue educating and training users until susceptibility and resiliency improves
• Train specifically towards reporting phish, not just disengaging with them
• Continually reinforce

Even with robust phishing training, it alone is not a comprehensive phishing defense. After all, phishing is the #1 cyber attack vector because it is devastatingly effective. You still need security specialists to react after phish have been reported, but without phishing training, downstream defenses have huge blindspots.

Phishing Simulations Are The Core, But Just The Start

Simulated phishing attacks are the foundation of any phishing training program. By immersing your employees in phishing simulations based on real threats, you’ll gauge the organization’s overall preparedness for an attack.

Phishing simulations are plentiful, but you need relevant, up-to-the-minute phishing emails based on real threats to condition employees and improve their resilience. Of course, your phishing training also needs to be monitored and administered to see what the results of each simulated phishing attack are and whether employees are becoming more resilient.

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 defense. Without relevance, users become disinterested and phishing training less effective.

However, it’s not enough to send phishing simulation emails to employees to teach them to avoid clicking – they also need to report them. A culture of awareness, and one of action, is the goal.

Additionally, the results of phishing training will show weaknesses in network defenses that security teams must address.

Phishing Training Results

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. 

Simulated phishing 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 and phishing 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. 

Phishing Training Cost

Cofense offers bundled solutions and free resources s that deliver key capabilities to any size organization.  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.

The real question is whether you can afford not to implement phishing training for your employees? Especially when it has a robust ROI.

We also offer Cofense CBFree

Not ready to set up a comprehensive phishing training and defense program? You can still get started right away and satisfy check-a-box compliance needs with our free Computer Based Training (CBT). Our SCORM-compliant materials are put together by the same experts that have created our phishing training content, so you know the materials will always be fresh, compliant, and relevant. 

All free of charge.

Access Our Free Phishing Training Resources

What Happens After Phishing Training?

Comprehensive phishing defense involves more than phishing 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 this 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 defense program involves much more.

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.

You need processes for reporting phishing or suspicious emails. That’s where Cofense Reporter comes in.

Then, security teams must prioritize these reports. Cofense Triage solves that pain point. 

Once threats have been identified, they must be hunted and neutralized. Fast. Cofense Vision helps your users stop phishing attacks in minutes.