Providing phishing awareness training to your employees is one of the most important precautions you need to take to stay in business. With the rising number of sophisticated cybercrime attacks that target specific individuals within an organization through “social engineering” emails, you need to ensure that you have the appropriate tools and measures in place to respond to this threat.
Hoxhunt utilizes machine learning and gamification to offer a different and powerful spin on phishing awareness within the workplace. Its personalized phishing education experience delivers targeted simulation messages and training to individuals within your organization.
In this post, we’ll talk about how cybercriminals use sophisticated phishing emails to steal your organization’s sensitive information and how Hoxhunt can help your employees better recognize these threats and respond to them appropriately.
Personalized, AI-Based Phishing Simulations for Companies
Once spam filters got good enough at ensuring that messages containing malware attachments rarely reach end-users’ inboxes, hackers and cyber-scammers started experimenting with emails that impersonated trusted parties asking for credentials to company accounts or other details that can be used to gain access to sensitive data resources. Sometimes these phishing emails can even convince employees to issue payments directly to the fraudsters willingly.
This type of cyber espionage is much harder to address with technology alone, which is why today’s security teams emphasize education as a key aspect. Often, simulated phishing emails are deployed as an educational exercise, in order to confirm that the company’s individuals have indeed learned to identify the differences between legit queries and fraudulent ones.
The purpose of having simulations versus simple education workshops is that simulations are more hands-on and interactive. It’s also a great way to get immediate feedback on performance and improves knowledge retention.
The way that most companies and services handle phishing simulations is fundamentally flawed. Generally speaking, all employees in the organization receive the same simulation at the same frequency. Yes, there are some more advanced phishing training systems that allow you to send out different messages to different groups of employees in your organization. This gives you the option to tailor your messages, although it involves more manual management.
During these simulations, organizations tend to focus on employees who have a bad track record of properly handling these phishing simulations. That said, they still send the same number of messages to all other employees – even if they performed better in the phishing simulations.
As a result, the employees who were good at identifying phishing attacks may become annoyed at receiving basic training over and over again, rather than “leveling up,” as it doesn’t contribute towards helping them further improve their training.
Hoxhunt, on the other hand, uses artificial intelligence to offer tailored phishing training to individual employees. Once an organization provides the user details and grants appropriate access to its platform, the system starts sending out personalized messages. It then tracks the responses provided by individual users and automatically figures out the right frequency and simulations to be sent to that individual for effective training.
In case an employee fails to flag a simulated phishing message, they’ll have to go through the training associated with the phishing attempt and the subsequent messages they receive will be of similar complexity. However, if a user successfully completes the simulation, the system will make future messages more sophisticated.
As subsequent simulations become more and more advanced, so will the corresponding training. As a result, this will help improve each employee’s phishing awareness training effectively. In the same way, if a user displays unfazed awareness, they’ll receive fewer simulations overall.
Hoxhunt’s system will send more simulations to users who continue to perform poorly in the simulations. This way each user will receive a personalized learning experience throughout the phishing training process.
Hoxhunt’s AI-based, tailored phishing simulations include:
- Individual learning paths. Hoxhunt’s algorithm automatically detects and adapts to user responses to provide the appropriate level of difficulty and sophistication in phishing simulations and messages.
- A gamified user experience. It offers a fun cybersecurity learning experience that’s designed to keep the user engaged throughout. The system awards points to users who successfully report threats and lets them compete against each other by showing their progress via a leaderboard.
- Micro training moments. Hoxhunt delivers small bits of information to each user when they report a threat or fail a simulation. This helps build their cybersecurity knowledge and awareness in bite-size chunks.
Customized Spear-Phishing Simulations
Spear phishing is a form of phishing which involves targeting a single user within an organization. A spear attack is designed using personal information that is (1) believable and (2) similar to the emails the organization receives on a regular basis.
Building a spear phish requires a lot more work as compared to a usual phishing attempt, which makes it all the more effective. As a company’s employees get better at detecting regular phishing emails, the hacker focuses on spear phishing to get the information they want to gain access to.
Here’s how this typically works: The employee receives an email message that appears to come from a trustworthy party. These emails are cleverly designed to grab the user’s attention and get them to open it. And once they click on its contents (typically, a link or button), they’re directed to a malicious website.
Hoxhunt’s personalized simulations and training enable you to implement custom spear-phishing tactics. These emails will appear to your employees as if they’ve been sent from a trustworthy source, such as someone from within the organization.
The system does this by using the names of people within the same company to make the messages believable, simulating customized spear-phishing messages. For example, an employee might receive an email that appears to have been sent by John from HR, but if you look closely, the “from” address is from a different but similar domain.
Real-Time Threat Response
Hoxhunt’s reporting solution collects responses from users and generates threat reports with one click. This gives you real-time visibility into your company’s cybersecurity readiness levels and helps you efficiently respond to threats.
This platform improves your employees’ threat-sensing skills and enables your security staff to prioritize and respond to real threats, quickly. Hoxhunt’s simulation training has resulted in reporting rates of over 70% on real threats.
Its global user network detects threats quicker than any other platform, and hundreds of thousands of users worldwide report the latest threats to Hoxhunt. As a result of this knowledge sharing, every user becomes more secure. It’s a win-win situation.
In addition to this, Hoxhunt escalates high-level threats so your security staff and IT department see and tackle the threats that need immediate attention.
Conclusion
Protecting your company from cybercrime is incredibly important for your company and your employees.
For this, you’ll need the right phishing awareness and training tools that will turn your employees into active threat-detectors. Hoxhunt will enable your employees to efficiently recognize phishing attacks and respond to them appropriately in the best way possible.
