Test your system to help fight phishing attacks

Phish Food

Safeguards for the IT infrastructure often neglect email as an attack vector. Although most companies run a spam filter, they pay far too little attention to phishing, and many companies have already fallen victim to data theft, espionage, and sabotage. The industry association Bitkom estimates the annual damage to German institutions by these attacks, which are carried out in an increasingly professional manner, at more than EUR 200 billion (~$163 billion) [1].

Although most companies focus their security campaigns on hardening their own infrastructures, they overlook the fact that the real threats lurk elsewhere: 85 percent of cybersecurity breaches are due to human error, and 94 percent of all malware finds its way to its recipient by email. More than 80 percent of security-related events are phishing attacks. Attackers have long since stopped focusing on seemingly attractive corporations and large companies and are increasingly targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are targeted by attackers precisely because they invest significantly less in their security architecture, whether by choice or because of budget restrictions.

The consequences of these findings is that companies need to invest more in their email security; in particular, protection against phishing attacks need significant improvement. This is where phishing penetration testing comes in: Gophish [2] provides an open source framework for precisely this task.

Gophish at a Glance

In view of the huge relevance of the phishing problem and the associated threat situation, surprisingly, most companies rely on extensions of established filter programs (e.g., SpamAssassin) that typically use plugins to combat phishing. However, it is not enough to filter out critical messages; instead, IT managers

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