A phishing awareness program uses structured training and awareness techniques to educate your employees about phishing attacks. This way, they can recognize, avoid, and properly respond to such cyber threats. However, training programs by themselves may not accomplish much for your company unless coupled with technical real-time defenses.
Let’s explore how using a Phishing Awareness Program alongside critical technical tools can bolster your cybersecurity posture and reinforce your business against common and emerging phishing threats today.
Understanding Your Phishing Awareness Program
A typical Phishing Awareness Program uses educational content on how phishing works, simulated phishing exercises, and teaches your staff to identify red flags in emails and messages, and how to report suspicious activity.
When implementing a Phishing Awareness Program in your business, your objective is to educate employees to recognize and report deceptive emails or messages designed to steal sensitive information.
This program is an excellent way to teach your employees to be vigilant with their security habits, but it can be enhanced further by merging employee training with technical safeguards. Since training alone can’t prevent sophisticated attacks, you can combine both approaches, using real-time defenses to bolster your layered cybersecurity defense approach.
Strategies to Level Up Your Phishing Program
For a stronger, more resilient cybersecurity posture, here are some top technical defenses to consider for your business:
Zero-Trust Architecture
A Zero-Trust security model assumes no trust by default, which means every access request by users must be verified first. This model applies whether your employees are inside or outside your corporate network. Think of Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) as a security guard at the door who checks your ID every time you enter a secure room, even if you work in the building.
On top of your Phishing Awareness Program, ZTA can have several benefits. For instance, it limits access to your secure systems and programs. Even if an attacker compromises employee credentials, ZTA prevents them from taking over your whole network.
Additionally, ZTA repeatedly verifies user activity, spotting unusual behavior that may be a result of a phishing attack. That also leads to a quick remediation response, enabling you to catch and stop attackers in real-time.
ZTA acts as an excellent safety net even as you actively train your employees to spot phishing attempts. It also minimizes potential damage and strengthens your overall security posture.
Regular Updates and Testing
Regular updates and testing are critical tools to help your business tackle the ever-evolving landscape of phishing attacks. For instance, cyber criminals are now using AI-driven scams and deepfakes to attack and compromise critical systems and user credentials.
For this reason, you may have to update your training materials, security policies, and software patches to address new vulnerabilities. For example, you can develop new training curricula, tools, and sessions to keep your employees informed on all the latest phishing tactics attackers use, including deepfakes and social engineering.
Continuous training hones your employee vigilance, which improves their security habits and reduces risks arising from negligence and complacency. Moreover, you may also need to automate software and system patching. Doing this helps you keep systems, software, and email security tools updated, reducing your exposure to known attacks and zero-day vulnerabilities.
Also, ensure you test your employee vigilance using phishing drills or simulations. That helps you understand how prepared your employees are for potential attacks and real-world threats. Moreover, it helps you evaluate the performance of your security tools while reinforcing employee training.
Real-Time Threat Response Systems (RTTRS)
RTTR Systems constantly monitors your systems and software for cyber threats and immediately resolves them, including phishing emails. They use machine learning and AI to spot suspicious activities in your corporate emails and block them before they reach your staff.
RTTR Systems can be an exceptional added layer of security in your business. Combined with Phishing Awareness Training, they catch threats in real-time and give instant feedback, turning common employee mistakes into learning moments.
These systems have four advantages:
- They have automated responses to common cybersecurity threats, including phishing attempts.
- They integrate threat intelligence from global threat feeds to stay updated on the latest phishing tactics, including AI-driven attacks.
- RTTRS gives instant feedback to your IT staff, enabling them to learn and to take action where human intervention is required.
- They offer continuous monitoring, even when your security team is away from the workplace.
Resilient Security Culture
You can build a security-aware culture where everyone in the organization, from executives to new hires, understands and cares about cybersecurity, especially phishing. It integrates cybersecurity awareness into the natural operations of your company, ensuring you can prevent or bounce back from potential cyberattacks.
Since plenty of phishing attempts succeed because of human error, a strong culture helps your employees spot these threats, report suspicious emails, and use technology to catch what they miss. It encourages workplace values such as shared responsibility, adaptability, continuous vigilance, and integration with technology.
You can build a resilient security culture by leading the way. Show your staff that you care about security by practicing good device hygiene. Additionally, make it easy for employees to report issues without fear. Implement real-time threat systems for extra protection, and keep checking how well they’re working to improve over time.
Setting Up Network Controls
You can also set up network controls to manage and secure network traffic. That often includes setting up firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS), virtual private networks (VPNs), and access control lists (ACLs).
One critical way to integrate Phishing Awareness Programs with real-time defenses is to use corporate web filtering, which manages and screens access to specific websites or web content to protect your business from phishing attempts and look-alike domains. It also helps you enforce network policies and maintain productivity within your organization.
It complements your training program by blocking harmful websites that may contain malware, phishing attempts, or other cyber threats. It acts as an extra layer of security for your business systems. It can also optimize your bandwidth, increasing productivity within your organization.