Skip to content
phishing
Security awareness

Phishing simulation

Run controlled phishing exercises against your own staff, measure who clicks, and land them on a training page instead of an attacker. Built on the same campaign engine as marketing email, with an explicit consent gate on top.

Read
7 min
Module
Phishing

A phishing campaign cannot be sent until the workspace records an explicit authorisation: who approved the exercise, and against which population. This is not paperwork for its own sake — sending deceptive mail to people who have not consented, in an organisation you do not control, is the difference between an awareness programme and an attack.

Use this only against your own organisation. Simulations are for staff you employ or are contracted to test. The consent gate is enforced at send time, and every send is written to the audit log with the approver on it.

Sender domains

A simulation needs a From address. Domains are registered under Security → Sender domains, verified by DNS, and issued a real DKIM keypair so the mail is signed and actually lands. Three modes cover the realistic range of exercises.

Managed
A domain you own and verify. The safest and most common choice — the exercise tests judgement, not spam filters.
Lookalike
A near-miss of a real domain, generated for you: character substitution, Punycode homoglyphs, or typosquats. You still have to own and verify it.
Spoof
Sends as an arbitrary address without DKIM. Realistic, but usually filtered before it arrives; use only when testing your own gateway.

The lookalike generator

Given a legitimate domain, the generator proposes variants an attacker would plausibly register and shows what each one exploits. It is a research aid — registering and verifying the domain is still on you.

TechniqueExample against acme.comWhat it exploits
Character swapacnne.comFast reading of similar letterforms
Homoglyph (Cyrillic)асme.comNon-Latin glyphs that render identically
Typosquatacme.coMuscle memory and truncated TLDs
Subdomain baitacme.com.login-secure.netReaders who stop at the first familiar token
Hyphenationacme-support.comAssumed legitimacy of a department subdomain

What a campaign measures

The funnel is deliberately narrow: opened, clicked, submitted. Each step is a stronger signal than the last, and the third one is what actually matters for training.

Opened
Tracking pixel. Treat as soft signal — image blocking and scanners both distort it.
Clicked
A redirect through a tracked link. The strongest reliable signal that a human engaged.
Submitted
The user typed credentials into the landing form. The password is never stored — only the fact that a submission happened.
The training landing page captures the event, not the secret. There is no code path that writes a submitted password anywhere, which means a simulation cannot become a credential breach of your own making.

The training moment

Anyone who clicks lands on a training page explaining what the message did, which signals were present, and what to check next time. Teaching at the moment of the mistake is the entire point of the exercise — a report that names the people who failed, with no follow-up, produces resentment rather than resilience.

Immediate feedback
The page names the specific cues in the message that gave it away.
Tamper-evident
Each rendered template carries a hidden watermark, so a forwarded or reused simulation can be traced back to its campaign.