Ahoy Hacker News! I'm Ben, founder of Riot (
https://tryriot.com), a tool that sends phishing emails to your team to get them ready for real attacks. It's like a fire drill, but for cybersecurity.
Prior to Riot, I was the co-founder and CTO of a fintech company operating hundred of millions of euros of transactions every year. We were under attack continuously. I was doing an hour-long security training once a year, but was always curious if my team was really ready for an attack. In fact, it kept me up at night thinking we were spending a lot of money on protecting our app, but none on preparing the employees for social engineering.
So I started a side project at that previous company to test this out. On the first run, 9% of all the employees got scammed. I was pissed, but it convinced me we needed a better way to train employees for cybersecurity attacks. This is what grew into Riot.
For now we are only training for phishing, but our intention is to grow this into a tool that will continuously prepare your team for good practices (don't reuse passwords for example) and upcoming attacks (CEO fraud is next), in a smart way.
Your questions, feedback, and ideas are most welcome. Would love to hear your war stories on phishing scams, and how you train your teams!
I was working on anti-phishing in 2003, before it had the name phishing. We were trying to teach our users not to fall for the scams.
It didn't work. People will fall for the same scam over and over.
The conclusion we came to was that the only solution to phishing was education, and education was also nearly impossible to get 100% coverage.
I wish you luck, but don't get discouraged if it doesn't work. We've been trying to educate people about phishing for 17+ years. :)
We shifted our focus to tracking the phishing sites and then tying that back to which user accounts were hacked, and disabling the hacked accounts and notifying the users before damage could be done.
PayPal actually holds the patent on what we built, along with a ton of other anti-phishing and phishing site tracking patents.