Cybersecurity Awareness month is right around the corner. As such, you may be assessing your business’s risk profile to identify weaknesses and targets. With phishing attacks being a leading cause of data breaches and ransomware attacks, security and IT leaders take this time to address email security vulnerabilities.

This post covers three tips and resources you can use to quickly strengthen your email security posture and defense against phishing attacks.

3 Ways to Boost Your Organizations Email Security for Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Scan for existing threats

You may already have a Secure Email Gateway or another service that checks for phishing emails before they get delivered to your mail server or cloud-hosted email service. However, while those rule-based tools effectively block known phishing attempts and emails with malicious links and attachments, they have limited support for advanced threats.

To address advanced email attacks that slip by your perimeter defenses, consider running regular scans of your mailboxes to identify the idle threats sitting in your inbox, learn what types of threats are sneaking through, and which teams and individuals are targeted the most.

IRONSCALES offers a phishing vulnerability assessment that can be connected to your Microsoft Office 360 environment in just two clicks to discover the threats lurking in your mailboxes. Once complete, one of our security specialists will walk you through your actual results.

Offer Specific Training

Anti-phishing tools are great at detecting and blocking threatening emails. Some tools can block up to 99% of all phishing attacks. However, when hackers send over 3 billion spoofing emails daily, the 1% of the phishing emails that manage to get through could be costly. One article states that “phishing attacks are responsible for $17,700 lost every minute.” With the consequences of falling victim to a phishing attack being so high, it’s vital to strengthen your last line of defense—your employees.

Whether you provide your employees with email security training at the end of a phishing simulation test or you want to conduct a more organized security awareness training initiative, educating your users on how to spot emails for phishing threats, avoid interacting with them, and alert Security and IT of the attempt will protect your business, boost your user’s security awareness, and will make your job a bit easier.

With IRONSCALES™ Complete Protect™, you can establish a security awareness training program as a standalone practice leveraging training videos on a wide range of security-related topics, or you can link to specific training videos based on phishing simulation tests.

Download our free guide for developing a Security Awareness Training Program that empowers end users.

Start Running Phishing Simulation Tests

Training is great, but the only way to know for sure if it’s working is to test it. This can be done two ways, wait for a user to interact with a legitimate phishing attack that slipped through the system or set up simulated phishing campaigns that mimic actual threats.

Don’t use outdated phishing themes in your simulations. Think like today’s cybercriminal and use language and strategies that mimic the attacks that are actively occurring so your users can prepare for relevant threats, and you can identify where more training is needed. Take the simulation one step further and customize the test based on the recipient's role, function, or access level.

If you want to start running phishing simulation tests and measure how susceptible your employees are to real-world phishing threats, try our FREE Starter™ plan. As you set up your phishing simulation tests in IRONSCALES, you can link campaigns to specific training videos that will help you improve your employees’ knowledge of email threats to lessen the chances of them falling for an actual phishing attack.

This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, IRONSCALES is launching a customer-only Phishing Tournament. Not a customer yet? Sign up for our free Starter package and join the tournament.