Increase Employee Phishing Awareness with Anti-Phishing Software

Though enterprises deploy state of the art network security systems to protect against threats, it serves no real purpose when it comes to social engineering. This is because a social engineering attack could bypass all defenses. Hence, social engineering is the greatest concern of the enterprises. Moreover, the social engineering attacks are so refined that it is hard to identify and avoid. One of the most popular social engineering techniques is phishing, which makes use of fraudulent means to obtain personal and corporate data.

According to a recent survey, almost half of enterprises have fallen victim to social engineering practices leading to security breaches and data loss. As per this survey, the primary motivation behind phishing attacks is financial gain followed by competitive advantage and revenge. What makes social engineering dangerous is the fact that it attacks the most valuable and the most vulnerable link in an organization and that is employees. Social engineers take advantage of human behavior and trick them into breaking normal security procedures.

Though there are many products and services that effectively address the "process and technology" aspect of security, only few solutions are available that adequately address 'people risk'. Since social engineering and phishing rely heavily on human interaction and appeal to the vanity, authority, and greed of the people, what enterprises need is an effective anti phishing tool. This helps to build the first line of defense by increasing an employee's awareness of phishing.

The anti phishing software assists organizations in evaluating the readiness of employees against phishing and social engineering attacks. By installing this software tailored with information about people, processes and technology within the organization, the enterprise can simulate either a simple phishing attack or a more targeted spear phishing attack. The tool then analyzes the social behaviors towards the attack and generates a detailed report. Based on the findings enterprises can design remedial measures to alleviate phishing risks, educate people and modify processes. This will help to reduce possible threats due to such attacks in the future.

A best of breed anti phishing tool provides statistics on user behavior, measures security awareness among employees, identifies data leakage, assesses Data Loss Prevention (DLP) programs, and tests the incident response program. Thus with such a tool a ‘teaching moment’ can be generated that provides a safe, customized learning experience for users – resulting in increased employee phishing awareness and knowledge that helps protect the sensitive information entrusted to them.

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