Security News > 2020 > February > Phishing tournament finds employees falling prey to malicious emails
The Gone Phishing Tournament tested how susceptible people are to opening fraudulent emails and entering their login information.
To prepare organizations for an attack, TerraNova Security held the Gone Phishing Tournament over five days in October, testing people at companies in 76 countries and 27 languages on how likely they were to open a malicious email and enter their information into a dangerous website.
"Employees of organizations participating in the October 2019 Gone Phishing Tournament received emails that simulated real-world known successful phishing attacks. These emails were sent in the employees' native language and used known phishing tactics to measure employee click rate. The goal of this global phishing simulation was to measure and evaluate employee detection rate of phishing," the report said.
"Using the same phishing template localized to employee language and locale, we measured how often employees clicked on the included link and submitted their credentials. The Gone Phishing Tournament revealed that even within organizations that have security awareness training programs in place, employees are still quick to click on emails and submit their credentials," the report said.
Smaller organizations are more likely to suffer from a successful phishing attack more so than larger enterprises that have sophisticated IT departments protecting employees through better, security, security awareness training and phishing simulations.