Beware of Phishing Attacks!!!

Learn about the #benefits of #phishingsimulations in improving employee awareness and understanding of #phishingattacks. Discover how simulations can help identify #vulnerabilities in your organization’s #securityinfrastructure. Explore the importance of developing realistic #phishing scenarios and ensuring the #safety and #confidentiality of #sensitive data. Analyze and interpret the results of your simulation to improve your organization’s security posture.

Introduction

Social engineering is a technique used by cybercriminals to manipulate people into divulging sensitive information or performing actions that may compromise their security. It targets the mind like your old school grifter or con man. The aim is to gain the trust of targets, so they lower their guard, and then encourage them into taking unsafe actions such as divulging personal information or clicking on web links or opening attachments that may be malicious.

Phishing is a form of social engineering where attackers use email or malicious websites to solicit personal information by posing as a trustworthy organization.

In phishing, attackers rely heavily on human interaction and often manipulate people into providing passwords revealing sensitive information to them or downloading malicious software on the victim’s network.

How?

Typically, the attacker masquerades as a trusted contact or entity, hoping to convince someone to hand over data like login credentials. Once trust is established — which is the social engineering part of the equation — other attacks can occur. Whether it be the distribution of malware, identity theft, or anything else, social engineering was essentially the gateway.

1. In the broad world of cyber attacks, 98% involve social engineering on some level.
2. During a given year, organizations face an astonishing 700+ social engineering attacks ever year.
3. Between 70 and 90% of data breaches involve social engineering.
   A form of social engineering, phishing relies on emails or malicious sites to solicit sensitive information from a target. Within the data breach landscape, phishing is involved 25% of the time.
4. In 2021, approximately 83% of organizations in the United States fell victim to at least one email phishing attack. That’s a 46% increase over 2020.

Common techniques

1. Phishing: In a phishing attack, an attacker uses a message sent by email, social media, instant messaging clients, or SMS to obtain sensitive information from a victim or trick them into clicking a link to a malicious website.
2. Scareware: Scareware is a type of malware that uses social engineering to cause shock, anxiety, or the perception of a threat in order to manipulate users into buying unwanted software.
3. Watering hole: A watering hole attack is where attackers compromise a website that their target is known to visit and then use it as a platform to launch further attacks.
4. Spear phishing or whaling attack: Spear phishing is an email-spoofing attack that targets a specific organization or individual, seeking unauthorized access to sensitive information.
5. Cache poisoning or DNS spoofing: Cache poisoning is an attack vector that exploits vulnerabilities in domain name system (DNS) resolvers in order to redirect traffic to the attacker’s desired destination.
6. Pretexting: Pretexting is the act of creating and using an invented scenario (the pretext) to engage a targeted victim in a manner that increases the chance the victim will divulge information or perform actions that would be unlikely in ordinary circumstances.
7. Baiting and “quid pro quo” attacks: Baiting is when an attacker leaves a malware-infected physical device, such as a USB flash drive in a place it is sure to be found. The finder then picks up the device and loads it onto their computer, unintentionally installing the malware.
8. Physical breaches and tailgating: Tailgating involves following someone through a door with or without their knowledge.

Top 5 Social Engineering Techniques and How to Prevent Them

Simulations

Simulations are an important tool in preventing phishing attacks. Attack Simulation Training provides a behavior-based solution to mitigate phishing risk across your organization. It provides the necessary tools to run intelligent simulations and measure users for a baseline awareness of phishing risk, provide actionable insights and recommendations to remediate risk with hyper-targeted training designed to change behavior, and then measure behavioral progress against that benchmark through repeated simulation.

Phishing simulations are emails that appear to be malicious but aren’t sent by real attackers and don’t contain malicious content. IT and information security departments typically send these emails to users in their organization as a test to see how they will react.

The software supporting phishing simulations typically measures how many and which users view, click, download, reply, enter credentials or (best-case scenario) report the message with a phishing reporting tool.

As phishing attacks become more targeted and trickier to spot, creating the concept of vulnerability is important to help drive the “why” of your security awareness program. Users understand after falling for one simulated phishing attack that they could be susceptible to a real attack.

Benefits of Simulation

Phishing simulations can provide several benefits to organizations looking to improve their security posture. Here are some of the benefits of using phishing simulations:

1. Increased awareness: Phishing simulations can help increase awareness among employees about the threat of phishing attacks and the tactics used by attackers. This can help employees better identify and avoid phishing attacks in the future.
2. Behavioral change: By providing actionable insights and recommendations to remediate risk with hyper-targeted training designed to change behavior, phishing simulations can help drive behavioral change among employees and reduce the risk of successful phishing attacks.
3. Identify vulnerabilities: Phishing simulations can help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their security posture and take steps to address them. For example, if a large number of employees fall for a particular type of phishing simulation, this may indicate a need for additional training or improved security controls.
4. Measure progress: By measuring behavioral progress against a benchmark through repeated simulation, organizations can track the effectiveness of their security awareness training and make data-driven decisions about how to improve their security posture.

Simulations play a crucial role in improving employee awareness and understanding of phishing attacks. By providing employees with a safe environment to experience simulated phishing attacks, organizations can help employees better understand the tactics used by attackers and how to identify and avoid phishing attacks in the future.

Phishing simulations can also help drive behavioral change among employees. By providing actionable insights and recommendations to remediate risk with hyper-targeted training designed to change behavior, phishing simulations can help reduce the risk of successful phishing attacks.

Simulations can help organizations improve employee awareness and understanding of phishing attacks, drive behavioral change among employees, and reduce the risk of successful phishing attacks.

Simulations can help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their security infrastructure. By running simulations and measuring how employees respond to them, organizations can identify areas where their security posture may be weak and take steps to address them.

For example, if a large number of employees fall for a particular type of phishing simulation, this may indicate a need for additional training or improved security controls. Similarly, if employees consistently fail to report simulated phishing attacks, this may indicate a need for improved reporting mechanisms or additional training on how to report suspicious emails.

Simulations can help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their security infrastructure and take steps to address them.

Successful Campaigns

There are many examples of successful phishing simulation campaigns. For instance, Terranova Security provides a guide on how to build a successful phishing simulation campaign that includes selecting a testing objective and scenario. Usecure also provides a list of 10 best phishing templates to send to employees that have some of the highest compromise rates they’ve seen within their customers’ phishing simulation reports.

It is important to note that while phishing simulations can be an effective tool in improving employee awareness and understanding of phishing attacks, it is advisable to be careful when conducting them. For example, there was recently an example of a British railway company that promised its employees a corona premium — but it turned out to be a hyper-realistic phishing simulation. The employees in question were not amused.

How to build a campaign?

The first step in building a successful phishing simulation campaign is to determine the objective of the simulation. This involves deciding what threat you’re going to target employees within your phishing email to test their security awareness. There are three main objectives you can use:

1. Malicious links: Use malicious links to test if employees are vulnerable to being misled into clicking on malicious links, deploying malware to their device, or handing over their login credentials.
2. Data Collection via Web Form: Fraudsters often lure users into clicking on links to fake web forms, so using these as part of your simulation can tell if a user is prone to sharing their sensitive data and login credentials with an impostor.
3. Infected Attachment: Cyber criminals routinely embed viruses in files to infect recipients’ devices, so sending users fake ‘infected attachments’ can test their endpoint security.

No matter what objective you choose, you’re going to want to try and accurately replicate the same techniques that an attacker would use to trick an employee into handing over information.

After choosing the objective of your phishing simulation campaign, the next step is to select the scenario your phishing threat will use to test the user. There are three main ways to build testing scenarios:

1. Spoof an internal or external department of your organization: This involves creating a fake email that appears to come from a department within your organization or from an external organization that your employees are likely to trust.
2. Spoof a legitimate organization or fictitious brand: This involves creating a fake email that appears to come from a legitimate organization or fictitious brand. Ideally, you should choose a legitimate organization that your employees are likely to trust.
3. Use current events: This involves creating a fake email that plays on current events or news stories that are likely to be of interest to your employees.

It is highly recommended to use an out-of-the-box phishing simulation solution with realistic examples when developing your phishing scenarios.

Ensuring the safety and confidentiality of sensitive data is a top priority when conducting phishing simulations. It is important to use a reputable and secure phishing simulation solution that has strong security measures in place to protect sensitive data.

When conducting phishing simulations, it is also important to ensure that employees understand that the simulation is a test and that their sensitive data will not be compromised. This can be achieved by providing clear communication before, during, and after the simulation.

Ensuring the safety and confidentiality of sensitive data is a top priority when conducting phishing simulations. This can be achieved by using a reputable and secure phishing simulation solution and providing clear communication to employees.

Analyze and interpret

After conducting a phishing simulation, it is important to analyze and interpret the results of the simulation. This involves reviewing the data collected during the simulation to identify how employees responded to the simulated phishing attack.

The software supporting phishing simulations typically measures how many and which users view, click, download, reply, enter credentials or (best-case scenario) report the message with a phishing reporting tool. This data can provide valuable insights into employee behavior and help organizations identify areas where additional training or improved security controls may be needed.

Analyzing and interpreting the results of a phishing simulation can help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their security posture and take steps to address them.

How to conduct attack simulation training?

If your organization has Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, you can use Attack Simulation Training in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal to run realistic attack scenarios in your organization. These simulated attacks can help you identify and find vulnerable users before a real attack impacts your bottom line.

To set up Attack Simulation Training, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Microsoft 365 Defender portal at https://security.microsoft.com.
2. Select “Email and collaboration” then “Attack simulation training”.
3. Follow the prompts to select a payload and login page, configure OAuth Payload, target users, and assign training.

For more detailed instructions on how to set up Attack Simulation Training, please refer to the Microsoft Learn article on “Simulation automations for Attack simulation training”.

Best practices for conducting phishing simulation

Some best practices for conducting phishing simulations include:

1. Setting clear goals and objectives
2. Collaborating with other departments
3. Educating employees about phishing attacks
4. Customizing the simulations
5. Monitoring and tracking results
6. Following up with employees
7. Gaining insights from training reports and continuously updating phishing simulations.

It is also important to ensure that ethical frameworks are followed to ensure that phishing tests do not do more harm than good.

Measure effectiveness

There are several metrics that can be used to measure the effectiveness of a phishing simulation.

These include the open rate, which is the percentage of recipients who actually opened your phishing test email; the click rate, which is the percentage of recipients who clicked on the phishing link inside the email; and the report rate, which measures how many recipients reported the phishing email to your IT team.

These metrics can help you understand how effective your phishing template was in engaging and convincing your staff to click or report it.

Conclusion

Phishing attacks are a constant threat to organizations, but understanding the role of social engineering and using simulations can help enhance an organization’s security posture. By educating employees and improving their awareness of phishing attacks, organizations can reduce the risk of a successful phishing attack.

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