Tech
About fire drills and phishing tests
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a series of catastrophes in a short period of time led an outraged public to look to the emerging fire protection industry for action. Experts initially focused on the “fire evacuation test.” The earliest of these tests focused on individual performance, testing occupant evacuation speed, and sometimes conducting “surprise” tests as if the fire drill were an actual fire. These early tests were more likely to result in injury to test takers than to improve survival rates. It wasn't until better protection techniques (such as wider doors, exit push bars, building firebreaks, and illuminated exit signs) were introduced that survival rates from building fires began to improve. Over the years, as protection has evolved and building codes have required improvements such as requiring sprinklers, survival rates have continued to steadily improve, and the “test” continues to improve with advanced training announced and evacuation plans posted. It has evolved into
This blog analyzes the modern practice of phishing “testing” as a cybersecurity control in relation to industry standard fire protection practices.
Modern “phishing tests” are a lot like early “fire tests”
Google currently operates under regulations (such as FedRAMP in the US) that require it to conduct annual “phishing tests.” In these required tests, our security team creates and sends phishing emails to Googlers, counts the number of people who interact with them, and educates them on how not to fall for phishing. These exercises typically collect reporting metrics about the emails sent and the number of employees who clicked on the decoy link and “failed.” Employees who fail this exercise typically require further training. According to the FedRAMP penetration testing guidance document, “Users are the last line of defense and must be tested.”
These tests are similar to the initial “evacuation tests” once administered to building occupants: individuals are expected to recognize danger and react in an individually “appropriate” manner, with failure explained as individual failure, not a systems problem. To make matters worse, FedRAMP guidance requires companies to bypass or eliminate all system controls during testing in order to artificially maximize the likelihood of a person clicking on a phishing link.
Harmful side effects of these tests include:
There is no evidence that testing reduces the success rate of phishing campaigns.
Phishing (or more generally, social engineering) remains the primary method for attackers to gain a foothold in businesses.
Studies have shown that these tests do not effectively prevent people from being fooled. This study of 14,000 participants showed that phishing tests are counterproductive, showing that “repeat clickers” consistently fail the test despite recent interventions.
Some phishing tests (such as FedRAMP) require bypassing existing anti-phishing defenses. This can lead to inaccurate perceptions of actual risk, avoid the need for penetration testing teams to mimic the tactics of real modern attackers, and inadvertently leave whitelists set up to facilitate testing in place. , which poses a risk of being reused by an attacker.
During these tests, our detection and incident response (D&R) team experienced a significant load increase as users sent in thousands of unnecessary reports.
Employees get angry at them and feel like security is “cheating” them. This reduces the trust with users that security teams need to make meaningful system improvements and requires employees to take timely actions related to actual security events.
Large enterprises with multiple independent products may require numerous overlapping phishing tests, creating a repetitive burden.
But are users the last line of defense?
Training humans to avoid phishing and social engineering with 100% success rate is probably an impossible task. There is value in teaching people how to spot phishing and social engineering so that they can alert security personnel and perform incident response. By having even a single user report an ongoing attack, companies can enable a full-scope response. This is a valuable defensive control that can quickly mitigate even sophisticated attacks. But just as the firefighter world has moved from surprise drills to regular, advance-notice evacuation drills, the information security industry must move to training that focuses less on surprises and tricks and more on training staff on exactly what they want them to do the moment they see a phishing email, with a particular focus on recognizing and reporting phishing threats.
In other words, we need to stop phishing tests and start anti-phishing training.
The “Fishing Fire Drill” aims to achieve the following:
Educate users on how to spot phishing emails
Inform users how to report phishing emails
Allow your employees to practice reporting phishing emails in any manner that suits your needs.
Collect metrics that are useful to auditors, such as:
Number of users who completed the practice of reporting emails as phishing emails
Time from email open to first report of phishing
Time (and lag) for first escalation to security team
Number of reports 1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, and 24 hours after delivery
When running a phishing drill, someone sends an email announcing themselves as a phishing email and containing relevant instructions or specific tasks to perform. An example text is shown below.
Hello! I am Phishing Email.
This is a training – it's just a training!
If I were a real phishing email, it might ask you to log into a malicious site with your real username or password, or ask you to run a suspicious command like this:
For more information on how to spot a phishing email, You can also test your ability to spot phishing scams yourself. Regardless of the format of a phishing email, if you notice that it's not what it seems, you can immediately report it to your security team.
To complete your annual phishing training, please report to me. To do so,
Thanks for your cooperation
tricky. Dr. Fish
You can't “fix” people, but you can fix tools.
Phishing and social engineering are not going away as attack techniques. As long as humans are fallible, social creatures, attackers will have ways to manipulate the human element. A more effective approach to both risks is to focus on the centralized pursuit of secure-by-default systems in the long run, and on investments in engineering defenses such as implementing unphishable credentials (e.g., passkeys) and multi-party authorization for sensitive security contexts in production systems. Thanks to investments in such architectural defenses, Google hasn't had to seriously worry about password phishing for nearly a decade.
Educating employees about alerting security teams about ongoing attacks remains a valuable and essential part of your overall security posture. However, this does not need to be adversarial, and there is nothing to be gained by “catching” people who are “failing” at the task. Stop working with the same failed protections as before and follow the lead of more mature industries such as firefighting, which have faced these issues before and are already adopting a balanced approach.
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