Protecting Your Team From Phishing Attacks

How to protect your business from phishing attacks through staff training, technical controls such as DMARC and 2FA, and incident response planning.

What phishing is

Phishing is a social engineering attack in which an attacker impersonates a legitimate organisation to trick the recipient into revealing credentials, installing malware or transferring money. It remains the most common vector for data breaches because it targets human psychology rather than technical vulnerabilities.

Phishing emails have become sophisticated. Modern attacks use real company logos, convincing domain names, and personalised content scraped from social media. The days of poorly spelled "Nigerian prince" scams are over; today's phishing emails can fool even technically aware employees.

Common attack types

Understanding the attack types helps your team recognise them. Email phishing is the classic mass-targeted fake message. Spear phishing targets a specific individual with personalised content. Whaling targets executives. Smishing uses SMS texts, and vishing uses phone calls. Clone phishing takes a legitimate email your team has already received, replaces links or attachments with malicious versions, and resends it from a spoofed address.

Each type exploits a different trust mechanism. Training must cover all of them because a team that knows about email phishing might still fall for a convincing smishing message.

Training your team

Regular, realistic training is the most effective defence. Run simulated phishing campaigns quarterly using a service such as KnowBe4 or Proofpoint. Employees who click receive immediate feedback and a short training module. Track results over time to measure improvement.

Training should cover the specific red flags: urgent language, unexpected attachments, mismatched URLs, requests for credentials and messages from unknown senders claiming to be internal. Make reporting easy with a dedicated "Report phishing" button in your email client. Celebrate employees who report suspicious messages rather than punishing those who click.

Technical controls: DMARC, email filtering and 2FA

Training alone is not enough. Technical controls block most phishing attempts before they reach your team. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) prevents attackers from spoofing your company domain. Combined with SPF and DKIM, DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with unauthenticated email, reducing the chance that a fake message from your CEO's address lands in an employee's inbox.

Email filtering solutions such as Microsoft Defender for Office 365 or Mimecast catch malicious links and attachments. Two-factor authentication (2FA) ensures that even if an employee enters their password on a phishing site, the attacker cannot access the account without the second factor. Enforce 2FA on all business accounts, especially email, banking and any system that handles customer data.

Incident response

When a phishing attack succeeds, speed matters. Have a written incident response plan that answers: who do you report to, how do you contain the breach, and how do you communicate with affected parties. The first step is to reset the compromised credentials and revoke active sessions. The second is to scan for malware or persistent access. The third is to notify anyone whose data may have been exposed.

Practice the plan with a tabletop exercise. The first time you run a phishing incident response should not be during a real attack. For broader security guidance, see our website security checklist.

Testing your team

Measure the effectiveness of your programme with three metrics: the click rate on simulated phishing campaigns, the report rate (how many employees report suspicious messages), and the time to report. A healthy programme sees click rates below 5% and report rates above 50% within six months.

Phishing threats evolve constantly. Review your training content and technical controls annually. New attack techniques such as AI-generated voice cloning for vishing or deepfake video for whaling require updated defences. If you handle customer data, your security programme should align with GDPR requirements for breach notification. See our GDPR for websites guide for details.

For a strong password policy that works alongside 2FA, read our password policy guide.