Phishing in Organizations: Findings from a Large-Scale and Long-Term Study

TL;DR

This large-scale, long-term study of organizational phishing reveals effective warning strategies, challenges assumptions about training, and demonstrates the practicality of employee crowd-sourcing for phishing detection.

Contribution

It provides new evidence on the long-term effects of phishing training and introduces the concept of using employees as a collective detection mechanism in organizations.

Findings

Email warnings are effective in reducing click rates.

Embedded training may increase susceptibility to phishing.

Employee crowd-sourcing enables rapid detection of phishing campaigns.

Abstract

In this paper, we present findings from a large-scale and long-term phishing experiment that we conducted in collaboration with a partner company. Our experiment ran for 15 months during which time more than 14,000 study participants (employees of the company) received different simulated phishing emails in their normal working context. We also deployed a reporting button to the company's email client which allowed the participants to report suspicious emails they received. We measured click rates for phishing emails, dangerous actions such as submitting credentials, and reported suspicious emails. The results of our experiment provide three types of contributions. First, some of our findings support previous literature with improved ecological validity. One example of such results is good effectiveness of warnings on emails. Second, some of our results contradict prior literature and common industry practices. Surprisingly, we find that embedded training during simulated phishing exercises, as commonly deployed in the industry today, does not make employees more resilient to phishing, but instead it can have unexpected side effects that can make employees even more susceptible to phishing. And third, we report new findings. In particular, we are the first to demonstrate that using the employees as a collective phishing detection mechanism is practical in large organizations. Our results show that such crowd-sourcing allows fast detection of new phishing campaigns, the operational load for the organization is acceptable, and the employees remain active over long periods of time.