Terranova Security Announces Registration For Third Edition Of The Gone Phishing Tournament, Phishing Global Benchmarking Report

Terranova Security has announced registration for the 2021 edition of the Gone Phishing Tournament event, scheduled to take place in October to coincide with Cyber Security Awareness Month. The global cyber security event, along with the resulting Phishing Benchmark Global Report, highlights the need for organizations to implement real-world phishing simulations to support dynamic security awareness training programs that succeed in changing end user behavior.

The Gone Phishing Tournament, co-sponsored by Microsoft, will test employee knowledge using an email template based off a real-world phishing threat. The template is based on real-time Microsoft intel that fuels Attack simulation training, part of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 released last year. Attack simulation training is an intelligent social engineering risk management tool that uses context-aware simulations and hyper-targeted training to train employees. This training measures behavior change all on an automated platform, simplifying the design and deployment of security awareness training.

“In the last year alone, we’ve seen some high-profile – and disruptive – cyber attacks on organizations around the globe that were caused by phishing emails,” said Lise Lapointe, author and CEO of Terranova Security. “The data provided by the Phishing Benchmark Global Report is essential for organizations looking to understand their users’ current level of security awareness and reduce their risk for data exposure.”

The 2021 Gone Phishing Tournament comes at a time of widespread transition. Many organizations worldwide are either beginning a migration back to the office or adopting a permanent flexible remote or remote-hybrid working model. This transformation brings about new, more complex cyber security challenges for organizations. With departments and processes more distributed than ever – for some organizations, across multiple countries and time zones – even the best technical infrastructures will feel an increased strain related to risk. The need for effective security awareness training is at an all-time high.

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“As remote and hybrid working models continue to take hold, everyone should be engaged with cyber security awareness training,” said Brandon Koeller, Principal Program Manager Lead, Office 365 Security at Microsoft. “Organizations need to rethink and reshape their existing security awareness training initiatives to give their employees the tools they need to detect and avoid cyber threats. Data provided by the Terranova Security Phishing Global Benchmark Report is an excellent starting point to do just this.”

The  Gone Phishing Tournament takes place over five days in October 2021. Like previous years, the Tournament’s goal is to allow organizations to discover how their click rate compared to those of organizations with similar characteristics, including vertical or industry, size, and geographical location.

Key Takeaways from the 2020 Gone Phishing Tournament

The Terranova Security 2020 Phishing Benchmark Global Report provided in-depth insight on the event’s results, including click rate statistics by vertical, organization size, geographical location, and level of security awareness and phishing simulation programs in place.

The Tournament, which saw employees from organizations across the globe participate in phishing simulations, showed that phishing email click rates were 9% higher in 2020 than in 2019 and that 13% of total users submitted passwords on phishing webpages.

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The data suggest that employees are even more susceptible to phishing attacks than they were in 2019. Current approaches to security awareness training must include real-world phishing simulations for reliable detection.

One of the most startling finds was that 20% of employees still clicked on phishing email links, even if their organization had a security awareness or phishing training program in place.

Findings also showed that North Americans struggled the most, with a 25.5% click rate and an 18% overall credential submission rate, meaning that over 7 out of 10 clickers compromised their login data. In contrast, users in Europe exhibited lower click and submission rates of 17% and 11%, respectively.

The 2020 Gone Phishing Tournament ultimately showed that many organizations weren’t quite ready to address the challenge of defending against online phishing threats. As phishing scams grow more sophisticated, the only way to consistently detect them is by supporting employees with a rigorous cyber security awareness program that includes phishing simulations.

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