Completed task on modules, "Design a Phishing Email Simulation" and "Interpret phishing simulation results"

Craft a phishing email simulation to be used to raise awareness of one of the most common threats organizations today face. Practical skills you will gain from working on this task:

• Cybersecurity

• Technical Security Awareness

• Problem Solving

• Design Thinking

• Communication

You are an analyst in the Security Awareness Team. Our Chief Security Officer relies on our team to help our staff learn how to identify and report a security threat to Mastercard.

One of the most common threats organizations face today is phishing (the act of pretending to be someone/something to get information, in most cases, this is usually a password). Attackers may send links or attachments designed to infect the recipient's system with malicious software or lure them into providing financial information, system credentials or other sensitive data. You can find more information about what is phishing in the resources section below.

At Mastercard, one of the ways we mitigate phishing threats is by educating our people about the risks and how to identify them. One way we do this is with our phishing simulation campaigns. We test our staff every month by sending a phishing email that is made to look like something a bad actor would send. We use the results of the simulated test to help us design and implement future training.

The Mastercard Security Awareness team has been asked to think about potential vulnerabilities and how to improve security internally. It has been decided that the first step will be to run a phishing simulation email.

You are an analyst in the team and have been assigned the task to create the upcoming phishing email template for the simulation. Try to make it contextual and believable. The results will help us educate employees on how to identify this type of threat, and therefore prevent a bad actor from successfully launching a phishing campaign on the company.

A few months back - we detected a phishing email that was being used by an external bad actor on some of our employees - thankfully, it failed due to being an obvious fake. However, we know that phishing emails are now getting very sophisticated and a range of tactics are used. You’ve been asked to use this email as a starting point and improve on it to increase the likelihood of an employee clicking on the link.

You can use the following link as the placeholder in your email: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

Please download the ‘Existing phishing template’ document in the Resources section below to view the email referred to above. Please update it to be more contextual and believable. There is also another resource below if you would like to learn more about phishing attacks.

Phishing Template to work on

More on Phishing

Below attached is my submission for the first module.

My Submission