Why email threats require special attention
Almost everyone - executives, boards, customers, and the general public agrees that cyber risks are significant contributors to enterprise risks and that they need to take cybersecurity seriously.
Cybersecurity departments in today’s world face no shortage of challenges. Cyber risks cover many areas and deciding which areas to focus on remains a struggle.
Chief information security officers (CISOs) need to balance resources across their different areas of responsibility while dealing with internal budget constraints, shortage of cybersecurity talent, and increasing compliance requirements.
The most sophisticated companies are moving to a risk-based approach for managing their cyber risks. It means that to decrease enterprise risk levels, cybersecurity departments must identify and focus on the more critical elements of cyber risk.
CISOs need to understand where their most significant risks lie.
While companies are investing millions in technological solutions to protect their infrastructure, the expanding attack surfaces and sophisticated cyber threats make it more important than ever that individual employees understand their role in preventing attacks. And no matter how advanced the technical solutions, some attacks will always get through. It takes just one successful attack to bring down an entire organization.
Focusing on the technological defenses and adhering to compliance can give a false sense of security, while the most significant attack surface, the employees, may remain unprotected.
Threat landscape
There are many ways for an attacker to infiltrate your organization.
It’s not exactly news that email-based threats are the most common method used by attackers. Ninety-three percent of organizations cite email-based threats as a primary threat, and employees are typically the largest attack surface for a company.
According to the Verizon Data breach report, phishing is the most common first phase of the attack. Attackers use phishing emails, because they work. 30 percent of phishing attacks are opened, but only 3 percent are reported to the cyber security teams.
Because phishing is the most common technique intruders use, solving it can have the highest impact on your organization’s risk.
Still, many companies haven’t taken adequate measures to protect their employees against these threats, thus leaving their most significant attack surface vulnerable.
Companies usually try to cover phishing as part of their cybersecurity awareness training, educating employees on a range of different threats. They also set policies that try to force personnel to behavior securely.
While important, traditional cybersecurity awareness alone is not enough to mitigate risks across all areas.
Learning how to manage some aspects of the threat landscape, like phishing, require more than classroom training or video courses.
Examples of email threats
Kill chain and early prevention
The global average total cost of a data breach in 2020 was $3.86 million. This figure is why it’s vital that you stop attacks before they can do significant damage.
The cyber kill chain describes the stages of a cyberattack, which can also help you figure out the best ways to prevent an attack.
The closer to the beginning of the kill chain that you can detect an attack, the less it will cost to resolve in terms of both time and resources. If you notice the attack only when it has reached your network, you’ll have to spend more time investigating how far it has spread and what damage has occurred.
No matter how advanced, the technical layer will let some attacks through. If you can’t prevent all attacks from reaching the employee, the best way to stop an attack is to make sure your employees know how to detect and react to attacks. Your employees can stop attacks even though they are already in the delivery phase.
Since even with the best training, it’s possible some of your users still fall for an attack, it’s essential that your phishing program also provides your employee with a simple way to report if they’ve already clicked on something they later realize was malicious.
Preventing attacks in the earliest stages has the highest return on investment (ROI).
Kill chain
The cyber kill chain, created by Lockheed Martin, describes the phases of stages of a targeted attack. Each stage presents an opportunity to detect and react to an attack.
Why isn’t technology enough to solve the problem?
Antivirus tools and email filters can identify and contain known threats. However, viruses and malware adapt and change, which means complete protection isn’t possible. While the technological layer continually improves, malicious actors are also finding new ways to bypass these technical layers.
Also, when attackers use social engineering tactics like spear-phishing attacks, malicious programs can bypass these technologies. In addition to email, these attacks can also target you through different mediums such as text messages, WhatsApp, and social media, where the user is often unprotected.
These different attack vectors are the reason why it’s essential to teach your employees to detect social engineering attacks as they will inevitably face them.
Why can’t you solve phishing in a classroom?
Attackers use social engineering tactics to try to trick your employees. You can’t effectively train users against social engineering tactics in a classroom. The purpose of social engineering tactics is to catch the victim off guard. They invoke emotions like curiosity, fear, and urgency in the emails, urging people to take action that will have negative consequences. The threat landscape is also continuously evolving, which means frequent and up-to-date training is crucial to stay one step ahead.
It’s essential to make sure your training has similar elements that the real-life attacker would use. Sending realistic simulated attacks to your employees in the live email environment and using similar tactics that the attackers will employ can ensure they know what to do when facing a real attack.
Why can’t phishing be solved with quarterly simulations?
Some companies choose to test their employees with quarterly simulations, often enrolling those users who fail the initial test for this extra training.
While this method gives companies some degree of understanding of the failure rates, it fails to impact the long-term failure rate. It also does not take into consideration employees who missed the simulation completely.
For employees to develop the habit of recognizing and reporting threats, you need to train them frequently. Training them frequently in the live email environment reinforces this habit and helps them stay vigilant against malicious emails.
A successful phishing program is human-first
A successful phishing mitigation program starts with a people-first approach. The training needs to be effective and motivating, giving the employees the skills and confidence to help protect your organization.
When you give employees the skills and confidence to know what to do when they encounter a threat, you’ll create a positive cybersecurity culture where employees feel they play an essential part in protecting the organization.
Cybersecurity culture consists of attitude, behavior, and awareness. A successful phishing training program will positively impact these areas, helping you to create a positive cybersecurity culture.
Protect - Detect - Respond
In addition to personalized training that will change your organizational behavior, you need to encourage your employees to report real threats and form a protective layer for your network. If one employee reports a threat, it might be enough to remove the threat before other employees can have the chance to fall for it.
As security teams have a range of different areas that they need to focus on, technology should ease some of the team’s workload rather than add to it.
Results
A successful phishing mitigation program will help to reduce cyber risks. To reduce the risks, stopping attacks early in the kill chain is a must. To do that, make sure that your employees stay vigilant against these threats by educating them.
If you want to make an impact, make sure that you emphasize the need for behavior change throughout the organization. You can achieve this goal with the right training program that engages employees to protect your company by adapting safe online habits.
To measure the success of the program, introduce metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Measuring how many of your employees fall to simulated phishing attacks and how many employees report threats can be an excellent start in this process.
At Hoxhunt, we have worked with hundreds of organizations, and we have received millions of threat reports from our users. The starting position always depends a lot on each organization. Still, through our training, the companies we work with have been able to bring their failure rate down to around two percent and have achieved a reporting rate of seventy percent on average. While these numbers aren’t directly comparable between individual companies, it provides a great benchmark on where your company should be heading to mitigate the risks appropriately.
