Today I am going to do a product spotlight on our Phishing Defender and Awareness Platform to double up on last week’s post about Ransomware.
It’s 2020, let’s face it we have had a lot going on to justify mixed feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and hopefully joy in small things. This topic makes many fearful; just don’t ignore it. The fear of falling victim to a cyber attack is on the rise and it is justified. While media has been steadily reporting huge cyber attacks for years, the SMBs are getting phished at a rapid and alarming rate. 100% of companies I talk to have said that they have seen a rise in phishing emails, and most know a company whose data was been held ransom, if not their own.
What makes you vulnerable? Why is your data more important than a financial firm or healthcare organization? There are many kinds of hackers, just like jobs, and just like those that target Enterprise companies, or highly regulated businesses, there are those hackers that throw out lines to hundreds, maybe thousands of small companies to see who has left anything vulnerable. Once they connect, they can be on your network for long periods of time without you even knowing they are there. They are quietly gathering all personal information about you, your clients, employees etc., eventually holding your data ransom, because that was just so easy!
So you wonder, what did I leave open? I have anti-virus, and firewalls, I even have advanced endpoint protection. How could this happen? The easiest answer is that your employees are the weakest link! In fact, 91% of all data breaches start with a phishing attack.
There are ways to help protect your assets. Train your employees on what to look for in an email to determine if they should even engage.
The Phishing Defender and Awareness Program is an ongoing online platform that is designed to train, phish, and analyze your employees’ progress over time, to reduce the percentage of phishing emails they will click.
We start each employee with a baseline test. This is a simulated phishing exercise to determine how susceptible your users are to phishing attempts. This is followed up with a 45 minute training on all of the different types of attacks, such as phishing, vishing, social engineering, CEO Fraud, spear phishing and more. Upon completion of the test, the phishing begins. We will work with your internal team to design a phishing campaign to go out once a month; these will be very difficult emails to decipher. If an employee clicks on the phishing email, they will have to take another 15 minute training. The goal is to reduce the click rates over time. We have seen dramatic results, starting at an average rate of 15.9%, down to 1.2% click rates in just 12 months.
This platform is all about education and results. The more aware your employees are of the black hat hackers and how they operate, the more prepared they are to identify them, before they penetrate you.
To learn more about Phishing Defender click here or call me directly at 856-599-5378.
