Phishing campaigns
Confront your employees with realistic phishing attacks, in a controlled setting, and turn the human factor into your first line of defense.
What is a phishing campaign?
Phishing remains the number one intrusion vector in organizations: one credible email, one click, credentials typed into a fake page, and the attacker has a foothold in your information system.
A phishing campaign simulates these attacks under real conditions, in a controlled and blame-free setting, to measure how exposed your teams really are and to raise awareness through lived experience, far more memorable than a theoretical presentation.
Objectives
A phishing campaign pursues several objectives at once:
Measure your teams' actual exposure to phishing
Get concrete indicators: opens, clicks, submissions, reports
Raise awareness through experience, without blame
Strengthen your reporting and reaction procedures
The HELX approach
A successful campaign is not about trapping people for the sake of it: it is calibrated with you (scenarios, target population, timing, difficulty level) and remains strictly blame-free. Results are reported anonymized or aggregated, never used to punish: the goal is a lasting wake-up call, not finger-pointing.
Our offensive expertise makes the difference: scenarios are built on real OSINT reconnaissance of your organization, just like an actual attacker would. Once the campaign is over, a report details the measured indicators, compares them with the trends we observe across our engagements and proposes a targeted awareness plan, which can naturally extend into our training sessions.
How a campaign unfolds
Every campaign follows a proven sequence, from initial scoping to debrief, and can be suspended at any time.
Target population, timing, difficulty level, themes credible for your business: together we define the exact frame of the exercise. Where relevant, legal counsel and employee representatives are involved in this scoping.
Credible domain names, email templates, landing pages and measurement mechanisms: everything is set up and tested beforehand. Any passwords typed in are never collected in clear text.
Emails go out in waves, at the times a real attack would strike. We monitor the campaign live (deliverability, first reactions) and can suspend it at any moment if the context requires it.
Open, click, submission and report rates, distribution over time and per scenario: indicators are consolidated and analyzed within the agreed frame, anonymized or aggregated by default.
A clear report, a debrief tailored to decision-makers and teams alike, and concrete recommendations: reporting procedures, reflexes to anchor, targeted awareness sessions to turn the exercise into lasting habits.
A bit of technical detail
Depending on the chosen scenarios, our campaigns can involve:
- OSINT reconnaissance of the organization and its targets
- Look-alike domains and typosquatting
- Fake login pages (mail, internal portals…)
- Harmless booby-trapped attachments
- Targeted spear phishing scenarios
- Smishing (SMS) and quishing (QR codes)
- Measurement of opens, clicks, submissions and reports
- Deliverability and spam-filter monitoring
Frequently asked questions
Are trapped employees identified?
The frame is defined with you: by default, results are reported aggregated or anonymized. The goal is to measure and raise awareness, never to punish: a campaign experienced as punitive destroys the trust the whole approach relies on.
Should teams be warned in advance?
We recommend announcing that a campaign will happen "in the coming months", without giving the date: the measurement stays honest, and the approach transparent towards your teams. A fully covert campaign is possible but should be discussed during scoping.
Is this GDPR-compliant?
Yes: purpose and scope defined contractually, data minimized, no password ever collected in clear text, results anonymized or aggregated, and data deleted at the end of the engagement. The exact terms are documented during scoping.
How long does a campaign last?
Expect two to four weeks: scoping and preparation, staggered sending waves to smooth the measurement, then analysis and debrief. Recurring campaigns (quarterly or twice a year) then let you track progress over time.
What happens after the campaign?
That is where it all pays off: debrief, anchoring of reporting reflexes, and targeted awareness sessions for the most exposed populations. Our Training and awareness offer naturally takes over.
Tell us about your project.
Let us talk through your needs and expectations and build the right service for you.