Employees Frequently Respond to Phishing Emails and Business Phishing Protections are Coming Up Short

Recent research has highlighted just how important it is for businesses to implement a range of defenses to ensure phishing emails are not delivered to inboxes and how business phishing protections are failing.

The studies were conducted to determine how likely employees are to click on phishing emails that arrive in their inboxes. Alarmingly, one study indicated almost three quarters of employees were fooled by a phishing test and provided their credentials to the attacker. In this case, the attacker was the consultancy firm Coalfire.

71% of the 525 businesses that were tested had at least one employee disclose login credentials in the phishing test, compared to 63% last year. At 20% of businesses, more than half of the employees who were tested fell for the phishing scam, compared to 10% last year.

A second study conducted by GetApp revealed a quarter of 714 surveyed businesses said they had at least one employee who responded to a phishing attack and disclosed their login credentials and 43% of businesses had employees that had clicked on phishing emails. The study also revealed only 27% of businesses provide security awareness training to employees, only 30% conduct phishing simulations, and 36% do not have multi-factor authentication in place on email.

The Importance of Layered Phishing Defenses

To mount an effective defense against phishing and other cyberattacks, a defense in depth approach to security is required.

With layered defenses, businesses are not replying on a single solution to block phishing attacks. Multiple defenses are put in place with the layers overlapping. If one measure proves to be ineffective at blocking a phishing email, others are in place to provide protection.

One area where many businesses fail is relying on Office 365 anti-phishing controls. A study by Avanan showed Office 365 phishing defenses to be effective at blocking most spam emails, but 25% of phishing emails were delivered to inboxes.

What is required is an advanced anti-spam and anti-phishing platform that can be layered on top of Office 365 to ensure that these phishing emails are blocked. SpamTitan can be seamlessly implemented in Office 365 environments and provides superior protection against phishing and malware attacks. SpamTitan blocks more than 99.9% of spam and phishing emails, 100% of known malware, and incorporates a host of features to identify zero-day threats.

As good as SpamTitan is at blocking email threats, other layers should be implemented to block phishing attacks. If a phishing email arrives in an inbox, a web filter will provide protection by blocking attempts by employees to visit phishing websites and sites hosting malware. WebTitan is a powerful DNS filtering solution that protects against the web-based element of phishing attacks. WebTitan adds an extra layer to phishing defenses and will block attempts by employees to visit malicious sites.

If an attacker succeeds in obtaining the credentials of an employee, it is important that those credentials cannot be used to gain access to the account. That protection is provided by multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication is not infallible, but it will prevent stolen credentials from being used to access accounts in the majority of cases.

Security awareness training is also vital. Employees are the last line of defense and that defensive line will be tested. If employees are not trained how to identify phishing emails and other email security threats, they cannot be expected to recognize threats when they land in inboxes. An annual training session is no longer enough, considering how many phishing attacks are conducted on businesses and how sophisticated the attacks are becoming.

Security awareness training should consist of an annual training session with regular refresher training sessions throughout the year. Employees should be kept up to date on the latest tactics being used by cybercriminals to help them identify new scam emails that may bypass email security defenses. Phishing simulation exercises are also important. If these simulations are not conducted, businesses will have no idea how effective their training sessions have been, and which employees have not taken the training on board.