Today, phishing attacks pose a significant threat to any user. Looking innocent at first sight, they can bring malicious code to any device. For companies and businesses, such an attack can cost large sums of money, and the best strategy against it is about training the employees.
Some studies indicate that employees often click the suspicious link infecting the corporate computers. Once it gets there, the whole network can be under the hit. Thus, companies should pay attention to them and provide phishing prevention. It raises the question of improving the cybersecurity policy and making workers, both inhouse and remote ones, follow guidelines.
In this post, we will talk about remote workers and their increasing growth of security risk within not only their home networks but also in your corporate structures and corporate machines.
Email Phishing Protection Issue
To start with, the research from Mimecast, one of the leading email security vendors, shows that employees are increasingly not following security training when it comes to remote working, using corporate systems, and trying to follow best practices and security behavior.
The email centric report underlines that roughly 73%, almost three-quarters of the people surveyed, admit to using their company-issued device for personal matters. They refer to checking private webmail, carrying out confidential financial transactions, and online shopping, and those activities in and of themselves increased security risks, especially personal webmail.
So if you have a corporate email system, it is better to have some corporate level vendor protection to help you deal with threats, including phishing scans. One can use an antivirus, having advanced features. However, the human factor here is more significant, as well as cybersecurity guidelines that are often ignored.
Reasons For Ignoring The Guidelines
How does your internet security protection system look like? You have an email filter, you have got firewall protection, you’ve got a service that goes through and, and can filter all these types of things out.
However, the workers’ personal email, relying on Yahoo or Google or Microsoft or whatever they get the email from, are not at any level that your corporate protections have.
It makes the company vulnerable to potentially malicious problems, ransomware, malware, scams and other types of things coming into personal mail. For instance, Infosec provides that it had the majority of the infections, around 90%, came through from employees who accessed their personal mail and then lied about it.
Interestingly, web filters, log aggregators, and network traffic showed where eventually, within the forensics, it came from. And although that was dealt with accordingly, and eventually lost privileges to access Yahoo, and Gmail, and personal email for all employees within the environment. This shows how big a problem was.
So now, when employees are working at home, it’s a lot easier to use a personal work-issued laptop. Because in most cases, their work laptop is probably more top-end, more powerful, higher quality than others they may have at home. It may not be applicable for everybody, but if that’s the case, workers’ behavior concerning cybersecurity policies is essential for your companies’ operation.
Human Nature
Clicking the wrong link is usually about human nature. But it was also revealed that almost a hundred percent of the respondents, 96% of the people surveyed, said that they were aware of the problems and consequences of clicking through malicious phishing or fake links.
Moreover, nearly half-opened emails that they had considered suspicious. They were just curious about it. And this is despite the fact that most of them have claimed to receive special security training that is supposed to equip them for better awareness and the new normal from working or home.
In this regard, training for the sake of training or checkbox training isn’t enough, especially when it comes to emails. Email is the number one entry point for problems, whether it’s identity theft, credentials, credentials, stealing malware, ransomware, talking to come in through an email.
Phishing Security: Guidelines for Workers
One of the cybersecurity solutions for following cybersecurity guidelines by workers is to check box security via phishing simulation.
For many managers, it means, just going through and doing a training every year, or, you know, a 30-minute video here. However, it is not enough when it comes to email training. The significant, significant success may come with building a fishing-based campaign. In other words, it is training against the employees and against their inadequate cybersecurity behavior.
Phishing Attack Simulation: Anti-Phishing Tool
How to prevent Of course, a simple phishing checkbox doesn’t have to be all the time; once a month or once a quarter is enough. Some organizations do it once a week, while it can just get people to ignore everything and overdo it. Thus, the important test is basically to simulate phishing attacks.
As a cybersecurity expert, you control it, you send in emails, phishing emails, and then you see what your click-through rate is.
How to Use Anti-Phishing Tools
The most interesting part about the phishing based campaign is tracking the results. As one tracks those metrics, it gives data. Thus, your security awareness program’s success can then be measured based on those phishing campaign results.
By that, you don’t have a hundred percent training completion rate. Everybody can go through and checkbox security. Imagine one such simulation. You are going to send emails into real email addresses that are definitely fake. Have red flags, have links, have fake web forms, all of those types of things. After it, you are going to sample and see who actually clicks through it and then say, okay, we’ll start.
One example Infosec showed is that when they first started off several years ago, their click-through rate was at 30%. So 30% of the employees went in and not only opened the email but clicked through it over time. As they then tailored the education program tuned, the phishing campaigns made them more difficult as time went on.
Their click-through rate is right around five to 6%. And that’s just because people are very, very hard to get to 0%. The reason is that people get tired. Phishing emails that they sent out were very, very clever, but dropping from 30% to 5% is a true efficiency indicator.
Use Communication To Raise Awareness on Phishing
As soon as you have the results of phishing attacks, you open up that communication channel to report anything suspicious. It helps to start a dialogue with employees on phishing issues and protective guidelines “You let us know, let us take a look at it.”
It tells the workers that cybersecurity experts are ready to take time to answer a question when it comes to suspicious emails or suspicious text messages, anything like that. It’s better to hesitate and ask than click and be wrong.
Quick phishing education is another option
A cybersecurity expert can send a worker to VirusTotal or recommend an antivirus solution. It is about giving the red flag. Quick education to say, yes, this is okay. If a worker just assumes and clicks through it, they have to be right; a hundred percent of the time, the hackers need to be right. One out of 1 million. And that one time out of 1 million can be very profitable and very successful for them.
However, cybersecurity is about being right all the time. And unfortunately, in this remote work, everybody is distant. Everybody is not around their employees. In the organizations’ case, this is an urgent question, as the employees are working at home, having looser network security, looser practices. As a result, however, in this remote distance, checkbox security training isn’t working.
Being Proactive in Anti-Phishing
So you have to think about being more engaging, more open, transparent communications, and have that flow. In this regard, presenting the sample test and being a little more proactive on the training rather than just a checkbox and picking multiple-choice questions are to increase anti-phishing guidelines.
It is better to change the way you think about things or procure more security control endpoints in this remote working. In particular, endpoint security tools and their establishment on the laptops.
It may be challenging, and it is another expense to compensate for the lack of security behavior. However, that is a price the companies should pay if they want to avoid harm from the phishing attacks on corporate networks and computers.
