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's essential to educate your teams about cybersecurity. One of the best-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 e-mail. The aim of this scam is to obtain data or information about the person who has the misfortune to "take the bait", hence the name.

Phishing is often the first step 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 a message medium, such as e-mail, SMS or a simple link, to retrieve all the information for malicious purposes.

For years now, phishing has been an all-too-popular misappropriation technique 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 companies 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 make an unfortunate move, and the whole company could be affected.

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

If a hacker manages to get a "hit" via phishing, he or she can seriously slow down or even destroy a company's operations. In short, it can be easy for a hacker in the case of successful phishing to :

• disrupt business operations, management software or even production machines;
• cause economic losses, in terms of reduced activity 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 office.

Phishing campaigns to raise awareness!

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 put in place 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 properly trained to deal with these risks, it is important, as previously mentioned, to carry out an audit to measure the degree of risk posed by phishing campaigns.

This requires the use of phishing test tools.

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

In a phishing test, you can choose from 3 likely scenarios:

• An e-mail with a link to a website,
• An e-mail with a downloadable document,
• A detailed e-mail requesting personal or job-related information.

This will make it easier for you to identify your company's most vulnerable factors. The following steps are essential for a successful phishing awareness campaign.

How do you set up a phishing awareness campaign?

Conducting a cybersecurity awareness campaign is of the utmost importance, as you will have gathered by now. If you're a team leader, CIO or CISO, the best practices for setting up an anti-phishing awareness campaign are as follows:

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

In short, a cybersecurity awarenesscampaign is designed to help all employees 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 companies, which is why it is so important to focus resources on countering these malicious campaigns.

Solutions such as Mailinback are available to protect your company against cyber-attacks, and to support the training of your staff. Thanks to its Cyber Coach module, you can simulate a phishing or ransomware campaign within your organization, to detect human vulnerabilities and check the behavior of your teams, with the aim of training them and raising their awareness of cyber risks later on.

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In a nutshell

In short, to make your staff aware of phishing campaigns, it's essential to first carry out an audit of the uses of the various media in which the company could be the target of a phishing campaign.

Once you've done this, you'll be able to put forward the right actions to take in order to render these cyberattacks ineffective. As we've already mentioned, there are tools available to help you raise awareness of phishing techniques from start to finish, from auditing to training your staff.