Perform Phishing Simulations with Real-World Examples

Effective security awareness isn't about teaching employees to spot generic, cartoonish phishing emails. It's about building muscle memory to recognize the sophisticated, targeted attacks they will actually encounter. Material’s phishing simulations allow you to move beyond canned templates and train your users with safe, sanitized versions of real threats that have targeted your organization.

Problem: Generic simulations create a false sense of security

Most security awareness training relies on a library of generic, easily-spotted phishing templates. While this checks a compliance box, it fails to prepare employees for the reality of modern, targeted attacks and can be even worse than no training at all.

This approach creates a dangerous cycle:

• Irrelevant templates: Your organization is targeted by subtle vendor impersonation and sophisticated Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks, but your employees are being trained with "Your package has shipped" templates that look nothing like the real thing.
• Training the wrong behavior: When employees are only tested against obvious fakes, they learn how to pass a test, not how to identify a well-crafted, malicious email. This can lead to overconfidence and a higher failure rate when a genuine threat lands in their inbox.
• Administrative toil: Security teams waste precious time trying to build convincing phishing templates from scratch or wading through thousands of irrelevant options in a vendor's library.
• Misleading metrics: Measuring click-rates on generic templates tells you very little about your organization's true risk profile. You have no way of knowing if you are resilient against the actual tactics attackers are using against you.

Solution: Train with the enemy's actual playbook

Material allows you to turn the threats you face every day into your most powerful security training tool. By using sanitized versions of real-world attacks, you can create hyper-relevant phishing simulations that prepare your employees for the real thing.

Here’s how Material solves the problem:

• Real-world template generation: Take any email that Material has identified as a threat and, with a single click, convert it into a safe simulation template. The platform automatically defangs all malicious links and attachments, allowing you to reuse an attacker's own work against them.
• Highly relevant training: Train your employees on the exact tactics, lures, and sender impersonations that are actively targeting your company. This builds resilient, context-aware security habits that generic templates simply can't match.
• Effortless campaign creation: Stop building templates from scratch. With Material, you can quickly build a library of high-fidelity, relevant simulations based on the threats you've already seen, launching a new campaign in minutes.
• Actionable, contextual insights: Get clear reports on campaign performance to understand which employees and departments are most vulnerable. More importantly, you can see which types of real-world attacks are most effective, allowing you to tailor your defenses and future training.

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