The security of your company's data and that of your employees is paramount.

In a world where the majority of information is exchanged digitally, it is essential to educate your teams about cyber security. One of the most well-known online scams isphishing.

NO NO! We're not talking about phishing here 🎣 ! Instead, we're giving you the keys to avoiding being the hackers' fish, thanks to phishing campaigns 👨🏽‍💻.

What is phishing?

Phishing is a scam that targets users via email. The aim of this scam is to recover data or information about the person who has the misfortune to "take the bait", hence the name.

Phishing is often the first stage in a cyber attack. It's very easy for even a novice hacker to set up a phishing attempt. All it takes is a list of contacts and then a message medium, such as an e-mail, SMS or even a simple link, to recover all the information for malicious purposes.

For years, phishing has been a technique for misappropriating information that is far too widespread for companies not to prepare their employees with a cybersecurity awareness campaign.

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What are the risks of phishing?

For individuals and businesses alike, this hacking technique is a real problem. Sensitive information can be recovered and misused for criminal purposes such as theft or industrial espionage. All it takes is one individual in the chain to do something untoward and the whole company could be affected.

What's more, personal data can be stolen. The person who made the wrong move could be faced with blackmail for personal information or identity theft.

If a hacker manages to get a "hit" via phishing, he can seriously slow down or even destroy a company's activities. To sum up, it can be easy for a hacker to succeed with a phishing attack:

• disrupt business operations, management software or even production machines;
• cause economic losses, in terms of a drop in business and possible repairs;
• engage in industrial espionage or modify important files.

As you can see, phishing attempts represent a real risk for companies. When it comes to cybersecurity, phishing is the first step in securing your offices.

Phishing campaigns to raise awareness and control!

The aim of cybersecurity awareness campaigns is to inform users about IT risks. Phishing attacks are not aimed at machines, but at their users. If all the individuals in a company work together to put into practice the good practices established through awareness campaigns, then phishing attacks will have no impact on the smooth running of the company.

Tips for phishing tests

To ensure that employees are effectively supervised with regard to these risks, it is important, as mentioned above, to carry out an audit to measure the degree of risk represented by phishing campaigns.

To do this, you need to use phishing test tools.

A phishing test simulates a phishing campaign, providing an overview of the results and areas for improvement.

As part of a phishing test, you can choose 3 likely scenarios:

• An email with a link to a website,
• An email with a downloadable document,
• A detailed email requesting personal information or information related to your job.

Once you have done this, it will be easier to identify the most vulnerable factors in your business. The following steps are essential to ensure that a phishing awareness campaignruns smoothly .

How do you set up a phishing awareness campaign?

Running a cyber-security awareness campaign is vitally important, as you will have realised. If you are a team manager, IT director or CISO, the best practices for setting up an anti-phishing awareness campaign are as follows:

• run training sessions
• implement anti-phishing tools
• send out regular phishing tests and follow them up,
• running support sessions

In short, a cybersecurity awarenesscampaign is about helping all employees to understand the risks they may encounter when using digital media. This type of campaign needs to be a long-term process, involving your teams on an ongoing basis. Phishing accounts for 80% of web attacks on businesses, which is why it is so important to focus resources on countering these malicious campaigns.

Solutions such as Mailinback are available to protect your business against cyber attacks and help train your staff. Thanks to its Cyber Coach module, you can simulate a phishing or ransomware campaign within your organisation, to detect human vulnerabilities and check the behaviour of your teams, with the aim of training them and raising their awareness of cyber risks.

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In a nutshell

To sum up, to make your staff aware of phishing campaigns, it is essential to start by carrying out an audit of the uses of the various media in which the company could be the target of a phishing campaign.

Following this small study, you will be able to put forward the right actions to take in order to render these cyber attacks ineffective. As we have recommended, there are tools available to support you in your campaign to raise awareness of phishing techniques from start to finish, from the audit to the training of your staff.