Phishing Education With The Forage

Phishing emails will always be there to trick and haunt our end users. Unfortunately there's no treat after you fell for the trick, when you clicked on the link. I know it's still a little too early for Halloween, but these attack vectors are very scary when they are successful and will keep you up all night until you have irradicated the phishing incident.

Phishing Education is our first line of defense against these attacks and training our coworkers to be vigilant against them will significantly increase an organizations security posture. How would you be more successful at providing phishing education? By taking trainings, taking advantage of educational content and learning from lessons learned from your own experiences, of course! I know that I have plenty of real life experiences because of my current technical role but I still continue to educate myself as much as I can.

So in order to continue to educate myself with a training from theforage.com. I took a Mastercard Cybersecurity Virtual Job Simulation where I helped to identify and report phishing email security threats. I was presented with a phishing email, I was quizzed on it's red flag identifiers and also had to compose my own Phishing Campaign email. A Phishing Campaign report was then provided to me to analyze where I was able to discover that two departments required immediate Phishing Education because of their Phishing Success Rate was very high. At the end of the training I had to create and submit a Phishing Education Presentation to help both of the Mastercard departments become more vigilant by understanding phishing email red flags to prevent a data breach that may cause financial and reputable loss.

Did I enjoy this training? Yes I did! Even though this is a Virtual Job Simulation and I have performed numerous phishing education for my current job role, I still felt like I was actually performing a significant task for the Mastercard Team. I strongly recommend this Master Card Cybersecurity Simulation to anyone who is new at providing Phishing Education or wants to continue to sharpen their skills.

I also have included images below of a previous Phishing Education email that I sent to the staff in my workplace to help them all be aware of the malicious email that was sent to staff members of our organization. It's your typical "I need you to do something for me but I'm not available to take a call from you because I'm too busy" Phishing email. Unfortunately we'll never be surprised that at least one staff member may fall for this scary financial devious plan, so we must take action by advising everyone of it as soon as possible.

I know that when it comes to Cyber Security there is far more than just sending an email to everyone in your company about a phishing email but communication is key when all of your technical controls fail to secure an organization.

Until Next Time!

Jose Soto