Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Ethical Phishing to Evaluate Phishing Awareness

What is the most efficient and cost-effective way of both, measuring your employees awareness of phishing threats, and building awareness of the threat simultaneously? By sending them ethical phishing emails to see which department based on which social engineering campaign is more susceptible to phishing attacks, at least that's what PhishMe.com is all about :

"Effective, memorable, and secure user awareness testing and training is now available with just a few clicks. Using PhishMe.com’s built-in templates and WYSIWYG functionality, you can emulate real phishing attacks against your employees within minutes. Focus your training efforts on the most susceptible employees by providing immediate feedback to anyone that falls victim to these exercises. Phish your employees before hackers do!"

Once watching the demo online, you'll get the feeling that it's actually a real phisher's web interface to spamming out phishing emails, so I guess the bad guys can in fact learn from the good guys standardizing approach and metrics mentality applied.

For the time being, Rock Phish represents the most efficiency centered phishing approach, with a single IP hosting numerous domains, each of those hosting over ten different phishing campaigns on average each of these with a dedicated cybersquatted subdomain. However, with the ongoing commoditization of phishing pages, the localization and segmentation of phishing campaigns, the next logical development would be the public release of a point'n' click web interface for managing real phishing campaigns.

Or perhaps a public leak, given that someone out there might have already came up with such an interface, without the sexy layout? And by the time there hasn't been a release or a leak, spamming tools would continue getting adapted for phishing purposes, and log parsers would be a phisher's best friend in respect to evaluating the success rate of a phishing campaign.

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