IRONSCALES vs. KnowBe4 PhishER/PhishER Plus

When deploying to a client who is very sensitive to email routing disruptions like those that can occur by putting an email filter in front of the email server, IRONSCALES deployment is extremely simple. It hooks into the user's mailbox, and not only filters point forward but a number of days back.

Incentivized

PhishER comes with some good features, such as PhishML, PhishRIP, PhishFlip, etc. These features help us manage phishing email reporting incidents. From reporting emails via Phish Alert Button plug-in to collecting all reported emails in one place at the PhishER dashboard. Now, the PhishML comes into play, scanning all reported emails and tagging each as clean, spam, or threat. With the help of this machine learning-based algorithm, our investigation process becomes easier. Other features, such as PhishRip, help to search and quarantine phishing emails, and PhishFlip converts a real phishing campaign to a test phishing campaign.

Incentivized

• One platform that integrates reported emails and using PhishFlip to educated staff.
• Automation to remove malicious emails from mailboxes.
• Instantly report back to users if an email is safe or malicious.
• Easily review vital technical information to help you make a decision if an email is a threat.
• Allow comments to be left from staff and IT.

Incentivized

• Issues with Global Blocklist
• Email Template Modification - Simplification
• Target Specific Users vs. Groups
• PhishRIP info tabs (i.e. if improperly check ripped emails are turned into tests. This has caused issues.) Info tabs or markers allow user to hover and get more information about what action a check box or slider provides.

Incentivized

When we first discovered that KnowBe4 released something like this, we saw a demo of it and were floored at what it could do and how it could help us from a security standpoint. Gone are the days of us in IT sending out a mass email saying please don't click on anything in the email from sender "X", and it allows us to quietly and easily ensure that people don't take any action on malicious emails.

Incentivized

I give it an eight for the feature set. While I only give it an eight because the complexity and interconnectedness of the tools mean that there needs to be quite a bit of RTFM to get the most out of the products.

Incentivized

I haven't needed to reach out to support very often, but when I have the responses have been timely and have provided the solutions I have needed. The support has been friendly and have always been able to resolve any issues that have come up.

Incentivized

It was very simple to implement - with just a few settings needed to connect it to our O365 environment

Incentivized

Postini, Windows Defender (built into M365) & Trend Micro email security. Postini was purchased by Google and then went away. Trend Micro was very basic at the time I used it (many years ago) and utilized purely blacklisting tech but that was before the AI boom. Windows Defender is not as multi-tenant friendly.

Incentivized

Harmony does not provide security awareness training or simulated phishing emails like KnowB4. However, it does provide a phish alert button & workflow similar to PhishER & we may stop using PhishER because the Phish Alert reports from PhishER don't feed into Harmony to help train it from phishing emails that go through. We got Harmony after KnowB4 because we needed a tool to PREVENT phishing emails from getting to people's inboxes in the first place, which KnowB4 has very little capability for other than PhishER+ blacklists. It is a shame KnowB4 does not have the anti threat phishing prevention like Harmony considering all the email data it has & its existing AI analytic capabilities.

Incentivized

• Understanding its limitations with regards to cyber security education campaigns
• Rigid domain lists. Might be attributed to how we purchase through a distributor but if a client needs to add a monitored domain name, it must be requested instead of allowing me to do it myself.
• Unclear if there have ever been any outages or service disruptions. Since it is monitoring mailboxes and not routing email, there is no outage client side. This could be a benefit but it also means end users might be unprotected during an outage.

Incentivized

• Phish/ER & PAD: Identifying email threats more quickly allowed us to send alert to the users' community in a timely manner based on the pattern of the threat.
• KnowBe4 Training Campaigns have proven to noticeably increase users' awareness.
• KnowBe4 Phishing Campaigns made users realize how dangerous and deceiving hacker can be.

Incentivized