What Is Phishing and How Do You Train People Against It?
Key takeaways
- Phishing is social engineering, not a technical exploit: the attacker needs a person to act, so the fix is behavioural as much as technical.
- Indian firms lose money to invoice fraud and credential phishing aimed at finance and accounts staff, not only to large consumer campaigns.
- A phishing simulation is the only training that shows what your people actually do, because confidence after a slide deck predicts very little.
- Report click rate and report rate, not the number of emails sent, and set a target each department can improve month on month.
- Anyone who clicks should get coaching the same day, not a lecture, because shame stops reporting and reporting is what shortens an attack.
As of 24 October 2026: the service descriptions, prices and turnaround figures on this page are current.
What is phishing and who targets Indian businesses?
Phishing is any message, email, SMS, WhatsApp message or call that impersonates someone you trust in order to make you hand over a credential, approve a payment or run a file. In India the most damaging variants are not consumer prize scams but business email compromise, where a fake invoice from a known supplier or a fake instruction from a director arrives by email, and tax-themed lures that carry a malicious attachment. Finance, accounts, HR and customer support staff are the targets, because they are the people who handle payments and personal data. The attack is cheap to run, so it never stops, and every successful campaign is a business email compromise or a credential theft.
How do you train people without damaging trust?
Train with simulated attacks, not slides, and keep the tone instructional. A monthly phishing simulation that sends two or three realistic messages to each employee, followed by a fifteen-minute session on the specific pattern they missed, changes behaviour far better than an annual awareness module. Never publish a list of who clicked. Report rates to the whole team, not names, and use the results to fix the reporting button: if reporting a phishing email takes three minutes, people will not do it. If someone does click, treat it as a learning moment the same day and let them report it openly.
Which metrics show whether the training worked?
Track four numbers, and nothing else. First, simulated click rate, which should fall over two or three quarters rather than after one session. Second, the report rate, which is the metric that actually predicts incident volume, because a user who reports a real email in two minutes prevents the whole chain. Third, the mean time from a user reporting an email to someone in IT acknowledging it. If that number is above ten minutes, the people who are doing the right thing are being ignored, and the programme will decay. Set one target per quarter and review it in the same management meeting as the security metrics.
What should happen in the first hour after someone clicks?
Treat the click as an incident, not as a mistake. In the first hour: reset the credentials used on that device and everywhere they were reused, revoke active sessions and refresh tokens, and check the inbox for forwarding rules, filter rules and newly added payees, because a click is often followed by a silent mailbox rule. Pull the relevant logs for the account. If the message was a credential phish and the password was entered, the six-hour CERT-In reporting window may already be running, and the IT Act, 2000 sections 43 and 66 may apply if personal data was affected. Escalate to your incident response path immediately rather than waiting for proof.
| Control | What it does | What it needs | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phishing simulation | Measures real behaviour with realistic lures | Written authorisation and a monthly calendar | Security team |
| One-click reporting | Cuts the time a live phishing email stays live | A reporting button inside the mail client | IT and security team |
| Same-day coaching | Turns a click into a lesson rather than a secret | A named coach and a non-punitive policy | Security team with HR |
| Payment verification | Stops invoice and CEO fraud at the last step | A callback rule on any payment change | Finance team |
| Monitoring and email security | Catches what training misses | A managed filter with a shared report queue | IT team or MSP |
What are the frequently asked questions?
Get a straight answer on this
Send us the size of your team and your email platform, and we will return a fixed-price phishing simulation and training plan with the monthly calendar included.
Send us the details See pricing