The first step in educating and training employees is to persuasively convey how significant a threat phishing poses to the long-term success of the organization. Educating employees about the dangers and consequences of phishing attacks is one of the best defenses companies can deploy to guard against the risk of phishing scams. In addition, employees should be educated on current phishing methods and techniques that are being deployed by hackers to deceive employees into giving up access to their organization's network and systems. This ensures that employees stay up-to-date on new and emerging threats, and keeps important data security practices and habits fresh in workers' memories. Furthermore, companies must also provide employees with best practices to implement to ensure they avoid the pitfalls of potential phishing scenarios, such as:

Never trusting an email based simply on the message's purported source;
Never relying exclusively on images or logos as a measure of a email's authenticity;
Being suspicious of emails with generic greetings and improper grammar style;
Being cognizant of the fact that enticing or aggressive email subject lines are commonly used to entice people into clicking on a link or taking other high-risk actions;
Recognizing that emails that threaten or urge "immediate action" are often used to scare and intimidate targets into acting hastily, before they take the time to exercise proper caution;
Never clicking on a link without first verifying the destination of the link by hovering the user's cursor over the URL to determine the link destination; and
Never transmitting sensitive personal or company information via email.

Finally, companies must also teach and train all employees how to spot and recognize attempted phishing attacks. Active training — as opposed to passive training, such as video tutorials — in individual settings is ideal to maximize the impact of phishing training regimens. A very effective technique that companies can implement is to demonstrate what an actual phishing attack might look like in real-time, and how that attempted attack is properly dealt with and neutralized.

Special Reports /

Employee education, training is key to curtailing risk of phishing attack

Related Stories

Recommended For You