Expert Insights Score: 4/5
What We Like:
- The in-built “report phishing” buttons enables users to report both simulations and genuine suspected email threats.
What To Be Aware Of:
Training can’t be assigned outside of simulations; rather, only as a direct response to someone failing. Also, the lack of analytics around training completion.
What Are IRONSCALES’ Key Features?
IRONSCALES is a post-delivery facilitated remediation platform with in-built security awareness training, comprising phishing simulation campaigns and awareness training content delivered by third-party providers, additional modules of which can be purchased as an add-on. Simulations are based on templates created by IRONSCALES but are fully customizable, and can be targeted at individual users, user groups or departments.
Users can report simulations and real threats via the platform’s “report phishing” button, which sits within their email client. If a user fails a phishing simulation by opening a link, admins can assign them training to explain where they went wrong and how they can identify the threat next time.
The platform also offers in-built reporting functionality that enables admins to monitor how users are responding to simulations. However, this doesn’t include reports on training completion.
How Effective Is IRONSCALES?
With IRONSCALES, admins can set up simulation campaigns from a wide variety of templates based on real-world examples of phishing that IRONSCALES analyzes each day, ensuring users are trained to identify the most current threats.
The report phishing button encourages users to report phishing simulations, but is also the same tool used to report genuine phishing attempts. This trains users to effectively respond to all suspicious emails they come across, and facilitates the centralized remediation of genuine threats. If a real threat is reported, IRONSCALES removes it from all their customers’ inboxes.
If a user fails a simulation, admins can manually assign them training; it isn’t administered immediately or automatically. There’s also no way for admins to monitor whether a user has actually completed their training. This means that admins canview simulation results, but have to follow up manually to ensure users complete assigned training.
Overall, the phishing simulation and report phishing tools are very effective, but the training and reporting functionality leave room for improvement.
How Easy Is IRONSCALES To Manage?
IRONSCALES is first and foremost a tool for Outlook and, as such, can be deployed in a Microsoft 365 environment in circa 10 minutes. Deploying in Google Workspace is more difficult; the documentation and configurations are tricky to navigate, so setup takes approximately one hour.
While IRONSCALES does offer a whitelist of domains that can be used to send simulations, the list isn’t regularly updated; this means some manual work is required to ensure simulations aren’t blocked by Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
Once deployed, admins can easily create and schedule simulations using IRONSCALES’ expansive template library, and users can respond to simulations using the intuitive report phishing button.
Reporting functionality isn’t very sophisticated, and requires manual effort from IT admins to ensure that users are completing their training.
Who Is IRONSCALES Best Suited For?
IRONSCALES’ report phishing button enables organizations to reduce their human security risk by training more aware users to report genuinely suspicious emails as well as simulations. Effectively, it trains these users to remediate threats that might go undetected by those who are less aware.
Because of this, we recommend IRONSCALES to organizations looking to deploy phishing simulations as part of a broader email security and threat remediation platform, with more focus on training users to respond to threats, rather than providing more general security awareness content and gaining insights into the level of training across the company.
Our Verdict
IRONSCALES offers next-generation email security with their auto-remediation tool powered by crowdsourced threat intelligence from their report phishing button. It helps lower overall security risk by enabling more aware users to mitigate the risk of less aware users clicking on phishing links. The testing aspect of the solution is strong; the training aspect needs some polishing.
Written by Caitlin Jones
Tested by Jacob Duane
Date of Testing: 15 December, 2021
Date of Publication: 07 February, 2022
