Earlier this year, we launched IRONSCALES™ Starter™, our free email security software solution. And since then, it has become a very popular option with IT security admins who need to deliver phishing awareness or phishing simulation testing. The popularity makes sense if you consider everything that’s required to implement and maintain a phishing awareness and simulation program.

Do we still need phishing awareness training?

IT and Security practitioners know that they can’t rely on technology alone to stop 100% of all phishing attacks. So, it’s important to ensure that every employee is prepared to identify phishing attempts. This is especially true for advanced phishing emails that rule-based secure email gateways (SEG) miss such as BEC, spear-phishing, or VIP impersonation emails that are not as obvious as old-school phishing spoofs.

To address this email security gap—and phishing compliance or risk management requirements—administrators add phishing awareness training to their security awareness training (SAT) programs.

An effective phishing awareness training campaign is more than a simple educational awareness, it requires:

• Phishing simulations (phish testing) that resemble real phishing emails
• Fake landing page similar to what some phishing email links point to—usually a fake O365 log-in page or a page that asks the user to “verify” their identity
• Instructions on how employees should report phishing attempts, such as an internal “911” email address, a support ticket, or (ideally) a simple report phish button
• Monitoring and reporting to understand what types of simulations succeed and which employees or departments are vulnerable and in need of additional testing/training

Creating these phishing awareness training programs (or even a one-time simulation) is not as easy as you might think. And there aren’t many dedicated phishing simulation training solutions available in the market. Most solutions are a subset of larger, more expensive security awareness training solutions.

So, considering all these challenges, it makes sense that Starter™ has become so popular for admins looking for an easier way to do phishing simulation training.

See it in action

To see how easy it is to launch a phishing simulation with Starter™, check out the video below with the product manager, David Vuijsje, as he walks through all the steps in just a few minutes. And after you watch the video, go try Starter yourself (it's free).  

How to launch a phishing simulation test using IRONSCALES™ Starter™