Cofense PhishMe vs. SANS Security Awareness Training

Cofense PhishMe is an excellent solution for scenarios where it will be sold as a managed service. I believe that PhishMe is too expensive for many clients and instead would benefit from the economies of scale where an MSSP sells it as part of a whole service, which offers the analysts and reporting included. PhishMe is excellent for training and awareness of Phishing, but shouldn't replace mandatory training for new joiners or yearly refreshers, it should only be used as an additional training option.

Incentivized

SANS Security Awareness Training program would be well suited for a large organization that needs to develop multiple training programs with different courses based on the roles of the end users. It seemed a bit difficult at times to achieve simple setup processes because of the configurations tailored to larger, more complex organizations.

Incentivized

• It gives clear-cut segregation of different parts of an email, header, text and HTML body, URL, attachments, HTML preview and some analytical insight like "similar reports." This distinctive approach actually helps reduce data overload during an analysis.
• The URLs captured here pass through an automatic reputation check [in our case VirusTotal] and add a tag of the reputation. If it is a well-known bad URL the tag helps us take the decision fast.
• For creating automation rules on the reported emails the "Recipes" section is really helpful. We can create easy recipes [or rules ] to handle a huge flow of reports and also we can create more sophisticated rules depending on the Cyber intelligence feed to catch the really bad currently less known attack attempts by malicious emails.
• The "Threat Indicators" section is also useful to use as a threat intelligence source to check the URLs for their maliciousness.

Incentivized

• Variety of cyber threat videos and presentations
• Web based and mobile access to the platform
• Easy to manage administrator access to configure the training sessions

Incentivized

• Completely switching to the new UI - Most is redesigned, but some old elements remain
• Ability to spoof known brands - limited in scope now and you are not allowed to use fully "convincing" campaigns that we are seeing in the wild
• Ability to own and manage own domains - right now adding a new company domain requires a ticket, allow us to add/verify ourselves

Incentivized

• Mass import of users was a bit confusing
• User interface was sometimes not intuitive
• Ability to upload custom content was difficult to use

Incentivized

Its built with UX in mind and is aimed at non-tech people, to ensure that almost everyone can run the campaign. But if we go deeper - sometimes you will need an HTML editor or support in order to figure out some advanced edits you might want to add in your scenarios.

Incentivized

I have not had to use their support for pretty much anything. The software works well, and is very intuitive. I would imagine their support would be rather basic as there is not too much that can go wrong with a report phishing button, and if it were I would probably consider a different software.

Incentivized

It's a must, even if you are never going to use the tool. Cofense aims to provide phishing training first and tool second.

Incentivized

There are some hiccups, but there are meant to be, when you implement something in a large scale enterprise.

Incentivized

Cofense PhishMe was the first choice for us as the user interface as well as their bundle package with Cofense Triage and Vision has helped the organisation to alleviate the overall security awareness posture. The other vendors did not provide a vast range of phishing scenarios as compared to Cofense PhishMe platform.

Incentivized

We actually are currently migrating to Proofpoint Security Awareness Training because of its integration with the Proofpoint email filter. This will allow us to target specific users who are clicking on bad emails with specific training material. We have used KnowBe4 in the past as well, but it was rather costly compared to SANS Security Awareness Training and Proofpoint. SANS Security Awareness Training seems to be the least easy-to-use interface from an administrative perspective compared to the other two.

Incentivized

• Recipes in the system are capable of handling almost 2x what an analyst does, which cuts down the efforts [of] an analyst and provides more time for accurate strategies.
• With roughly 90% false positives coming through, the remaining 10% of true positives need as much attention as they can get for the full investigation and analysis.
• 1,500 or more phishing messages can come through in a given week and the amount of time/employees required to review this without a tool like Cofense is surely beyond [the] expected/anticipated budget.

Incentivized

• Positive impact knowing we are educating our staff from phishing and potential cyber criminals
• Considering the potential for bad actors infiltrating our network, this is a small expense
• Pricing based on actual end users, worth the investment

Incentivized