Introduction
It doesn't matter how many security measures you opt for or how many machineries you incorporate in your organization, the human factor still remains the weakest link. Humans are always considered to be the ones that can be easily exploited and one such way to do that is through the usage of phishing emails.
Also, the bad boys are getting more equipped and advanced because of the newer and innovative techniques of exploiting the employees. Where some of the security measures or training can fall short, the organizations are exploring the possibility of mocking their employees by sending virtual or testing phishing emails to them.
What are Phishing Simulators or Tools?
Phishing stimulators or tools are significantly utilized to release mock attacks to test the employees of the organization. These tools send out several batches of mock attacks to a large number of users and analyze how the employees will react and interact with these emails. Those who become the victim of these attacks, some of these tools direct such victims to a certain page where everything is explained regarding phishing emails. When you want a phishing simulator for your company or an organization, you need to look for the following three things:
- It must be open-source
- Crafting of the message in such a way that it can be sent to an individual or a group of individuals
- Demo versions
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Top Free Phishing Simulators or Tools
We are continuously talking about phishing simulators or tools, let us now explore some of the leading phishing simulators or tools which are stated as follows:
- Gophish
Gophish fills up all of the above-mentioned conditions and becomes one of the most effective phishing tools which provides an open-source platform to its users. It consists of a large number of operating systems and it gets downloaded in lesser time as compared to any other tool. The interface of Gophish is extremely simple to understand, thus; any user can use this intuitive interface for his/her wellbeing.
Gophish holds a limited number of features but all of these features, if perfectly implemented, can change the entire outlook of the organization. All the users can be easily entered into this tool and it is efficient enough to create various campaigns and mock attacks to test the users.
- Simple Phishing Toolkit (sptoolkit)
Simple Phishing Toolkit may contain lesser features than any other tool but one thing makes this tool to be viable to be among one of the leading tools. This is the feature of incorporating educational videos that are sent out with the mock emails to the users. Whenever a user will succumb to such emails, that specific email will immediately guide him/her to this video which will contain all the measures of incorporating security and protection.
Moreover, this toolkit keeps a check on all of those users who became a victim of this scam and are now getting trained. Simple Phishing Toolkit will track them as long as they getting that training and once they complete it, they get notified by an email or any other source. This toolkit falls short in the year 2013, but some professionals are trying to revive it as soon as possible because of its profound feature.
- King Phisher
King Phisher is the kind of phishing simulator that can bring immense benefits to the organization. It is a platform that is open-source and a large number of people can take advantage of it. It also offers various campaigns along with the mock attacks for the testing of the users. It also helps in locating those users who have been phished by the mock emails and detect their performance. It contains various web-cloning abilities along with being the home of the simplest user interface.
However, King Phisher also has some technicalities which show up at the time of configuration and installation. It doesn't contain various operating systems such as the Gophish and only Linux supports King Phisher to carry out various functions. All the steps of configuration and installation depend upon the already existing configuration along with its flavor which can be quite difficult to comprehend.
- Social-Engineer Toolkit
As the name indicates, Social-Engineering Toolkit is used to tackle the attacks of social-engineering and come up with some solid campaigns. It contains various advanced options that can be used for the proper execution and training of the users. These options contain the targeting of specific emails in a file that can be used later on and flagging your messages as they reach the end-users.
When we use Social-Engineering Toolkit for penetration measures, this tool can be the most effective tool of all. However, when we use this tool for providing phishing solutions, it can be extremely limited and it is now very famous for properly managing the campaigns. However, by giving an overall view, Social-Engineering Toolkit still comes among the top tools.
- Infosec IQ
Infosec IQ comes at the top of being the most effective and profound phishing simulator. This is because it efficiently generates a large of campaigns that automatically gather the phishing rate of the users. This simulator encapsulates a large number of tools in which the most important one is the PhishSim, this tool can generate simulations that can be optimized for your entire organization. Infosec contains 1000+ templates, data entry landing pages, and attachments and that is why the term library is referred to as Infosec.
All the templates of the phishing mock attacks are added on a weekly basis so that the users will not have to wait much longer. The users will get tested back to back which increases the efficiency of the entire organization altogether. Infosec also provides you with the opportunity to procreate your own campaigns that will be useful to acquire more information on the phishing emails and scams.
Employees Will Always be the First Line of Defense
The more employees an organization hires, the more exposure it gets to the digital attackers. This is because it takes only one employee to click on this scam email and let the sensitive data be exposed to the hackers. A big example is the Anthem Breach which affected about 80 million people and when we look at Target, this organization faced a tremendous financial loss of $162 million. This mournful event took place when a vendor received a phishing email exposing the personal information of an employee to the hacker.
Technology can prove to be fruitful to some extent but the employees will always be the first line of defense. It is the employees who take care of all the machinery and equipment and keep them updated and maintained. Thus, if one wants to better the security conditions of an organization, the training of employees should be the top-most priority.
In that case, we have brought CISSP Training which will efficiently train and nourish the abilities. If you want to become a proficient Information Security professional so that the companies will choose you over anybody else then you should certainly look up this training. This training will develop a better understanding of all the security measures used for the protection of valuable data in an organization.