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Employees are often the weakest link in the chain for any organisation’s security. Test how your employees react to our carefully tailored phishing campaigns to help train your employees how to spot and deal with phishing emails

What Is It?

A phishing assessment is a security exercise designed to evaluate the awareness and responsiveness of an organisation’s employees to phishing attacks. It involves simulating phishing campaigns that mimic real-world tactics, aiming to trick employees into revealing sensitive information, clicking on malicious links, or downloading infected attachments. The results of the assessment provide valuable insights into the organisation’s vulnerability to such attacks and help in enhancing employee training, improving security policies, and fortifying overall cybersecurity defenses.

What Challenges Can Be Addressed By Phishing Assessments?

Employee Awareness and Training

One of the biggest challenges organisations face is ensuring all employees are aware of the risks associated with phishing scams and know how to recognise them. Phishing assessments can identify gaps in employee knowledge and effectiveness of existing training programs, highlighting areas where additional education is needed.

Identifying Vulnerabilities in Email Systems

Phishing assessments can help organisations understand how effective their email filtering and security systems are at detecting and preventing phishing emails from reaching end users. This can lead to improvements in technical defenses and configurations to better protect against phishing attacks.

Assessing Incident Response Processes

When employees fall for a phishing attempt in a simulated exercise, it provides a safe environment to test how well the organisation’s incident response team reacts. This includes the effectiveness of reporting mechanisms, the speed of response, and the ability to contain and mitigate the incident.

The Forfend Methodology:

Planning and Design – Forfend consultants work alongside the organisation’s key stakeholders to define the objectives of the phishing engagement, such as identifying vulnerabilities in employee awareness or testing the effectiveness of email filters. This also indluces selecting the types of phishing emails to be used (e.g., spear-phishing, whaling, etc.), designing the phishing messages, and deciding on the metrics for success. This step also involve obtaining necessary approvals and ensuring that the campaign aligns with legal and ethical guidelines.

Execution and Deployment – Phishing emails are sent out to the targeted recipients within the organisation. This is done carefully to mimic actual phishing tactics without causing harm, ensuring that the deployment is covert to get an accurate measure of employee reactions to phishing attempts.

Monitoring and Collection – Forfend consultants monitor the engagement in real-time to collect data on how recipients interact with the phishing emails. This includes tracking who opens the emails, clicks on links, submits information, or reports the email as suspicious. It’s essential to ensure that this phase is conducted discreetly to avoid alerting the participants prematurely.

Why Choose Us?

Experience, Qualifications and Expertise

All Forfend consultants are highly experienced and qualified penetration testers who hold the highest industry certifications. Experts in a comprehensive portfolio of testing methodologies, we identify system vulnerabilities and offer practical remediation advice, in a manner that is understandable and digestible by everyone from management to developers.

Personalised Consultancy Services

We deliver highly personalised, professional consultancy services; the consultant carrying out the engagement being involved throughout the entire process, from initial scoping to testing, reporting, and responding to questions that may arise once the remediation process is underway.

Value For
Money

As a small cyber security consultancy with limited overheads, we’re able to offer prices that are very competitive when compared to the rest of the industry, yet still deliver a high quality engagement. Forfend consultants are well versed at identifying vulnerabilities missed by other consultants.

Experience In A Range Of Industries

Our consultants have experience working in a range of different industries, from central government departments, critical national infrastructure, and councils, to legal, finance and technology sectors. Forfend consultants understand the threats and challenges faced by each industry, and are suited to offer testing types tailored to each sector’s needs.

Drop Us A Message

      01217691922
      11 Brindley Place, Brunswick Square, Birmingham, B1 2LP

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