3 Ways End User Collaboration Can Empower Defenses against Phishing

Have you considered educating your employees about possible cyber threats and how they should react to them? If not, it's high time to tick off this item on your checklist for cybersecurity programs.

With workspaces increasingly adopting the hybrid model, it is cardinal for your employees to be wary of possible cyber threats that can pop up, do harm, and cause havoc to your business operations.

According to statistics by a global cybersecurity education company, 95% of cybersecurity breaches occur due to human errors. Employees are your first line of defense and act as a proactive human firewall to safeguard your critical assets from cyber-attacks.

Establishing a Cyber Awareness Training Program is a significant step towards mitigating human risk. However, your employees may need assistance to strengthen their ability to identify well-crafted phishing scams that will allow your cyber team to respond fast enough to real threats, and collectively learn from those experiences.

So, how do you support your employees/cyber team and provide them the insights to identify phishing risks?

1. Facilitate the Ease to Report Any Suspicious Email from End-Users to the Cyber Team

Does your cybersecurity awareness training help in effectively detecting phishing risks? Let’s say yes. In that case, the immediate reaction after identifying a suspicious email must be reporting it to your cyber team.

Ensure that you educate your employees to reach out to the cyber teams regarding any suspicious activity at the earliest. The key here is to prevent the chances of a distracted employee from falling prey to a phishing attempt.

Furthermore, reporting mechanism must be kept simple. This could be anything like including an "add-in" button in the outlook account of your users. They should be able to report the suspicious activity and remove it from their inbox in just a few clicks.

2. Automate the Triage of the Reports to Respond Fast and Accurately

It is important that you document, record the happenings along with the measures taken to mitigate the risks of cyberattacks. It’s even more important to quickly respond to threats or suspicious activity your users identify and report.

However, an increasing volume of user reports may impact the ability of your cyber team to effectively respond since they may be already struggling to keep up with vulnerability patching, compliance reporting, and other threat mitigation activities.

Approximately only 1 in 10 user-reported emails is malicious. So, the challenge is not just in handling the high-risk phishing attacks and threats but also in striking the right balance in managing the 90% of messages that aren't malicious.

One way to overcome this challenge is to add machine learning capabilities that could provide a hand to ease the triage and automate tasks such as confirming that the reported email has previously been identified as a phishing scam and, once confirmed, looking for the same/similar phishing emails in other employees’ mailboxes and removing it from there.

3. Turn Detected Scams into a Learning Opportunity

The next important step on your radar should be to ensure that your users have a homogeneous knowledge of the real threats that are knocking at the door of your organization. You could leverage these user-reported phishing attacks targeted at your organization into safe simulated phishing campaigns.

What else could be better than flipping a confirmed malicious real email to a safe phishing simulation for end-users? That could be your most real phishing simulation campaign.

How Can This Be Done Effectively?

Our partner Knowbe4, a leader in the Awareness Training and Phishing Simulation arena, addresses all three needs described above with PhishER, helping you cut through your inbox noise and respond to the most dangerous threats quickly and efficiently.

What Is PhishER?

PhishER is an important aspect of the security workstream. It’s a lightweight SOAR platform that helps you balance threat response and also manage the high volume of potentially malicious messages that have been reported by the users.

It also comes with automatic prioritization of emails further contributing towards InfoSec and Security Operations that prove important to respond to threats.

The Incident Response (IR) orchestration, a part of PhishER, helps easily deliver efficiencies to the security team. Also, PhishER helps your IR teams to work in unison to mitigate phishing threats and automatically prioritize, manage potentially malicious messages/emails accurately.

How Does PhishER Work?

Why Should You Choose PhishER?

PhishER is a user-friendly and simple web-based platform. It includes critical workstream functionalities that provide the much-required support for you to identify and respond to user-reported messages.

This platform equips you to swiftly prioritize and analyze legitimate messages thereby enabling you to handle larger volumes of email messages at ease.

PhishER also includes several other features like the following:

• Automatic Message Prioritization
• Emergency Rooms
• SIEM Integrations
• PhishML
• PhishRIP
• PhishFlip
• Data Enrichment Intelligence

Wrap Up

Organizations must isolate and predict cyber threats that may compromise the overall health of their business. Though you may focus on creating and spreading cybersecurity awareness amongst your workforce, it is equally pivotal to allow your end-users to collaborate in identifying threats such as phishing scams, and your cyber teams to quickly assess and respond to the real threats. Else, these may themself pose serious threats like overlooking genuine risks to your network.

How Can Quantum Strides Help?

You can start by providing a Phish Alert Button for your end-users.

Try it here: Free Phish Alert | KnowBe4.

You may also want to have a better understanding of your phish-prone rates with a free Phishing Simulation Test accessible here: Phishing Security Test (knowbe4.com).

Finally, you can book a PhishER demo at no cost by registering in the following link: PhishER Demo | KnowBe4.

If you want to know more about PhishER, feel free to contact us or email us at cybersecurity@quantumstrides.com

About Quantum Strides

Quantum Strides is a KnowBe4 authorized business partner and a connoisseur in a plethora of cybersecurity offerings in the ransomware protection domain, that include but are not limited to vulnerability and penetration testing, awareness training, phishing simulations, and dark web monitoring for corporate stolen credentials.