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Launch HN: Riot (YC W20) – Phishing training for your team

114 points BenjaminN | 5 comments | 24 Mar 20 17:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.76s | source

Ahoy Hacker News! I'm Ben, founder of Riot (https://tryriot.com), a tool that sends phishing emails to your team to get them ready for real attacks. It's like a fire drill, but for cybersecurity.

Prior to Riot, I was the co-founder and CTO of a fintech company operating hundred of millions of euros of transactions every year. We were under attack continuously. I was doing an hour-long security training once a year, but was always curious if my team was really ready for an attack. In fact, it kept me up at night thinking we were spending a lot of money on protecting our app, but none on preparing the employees for social engineering.

So I started a side project at that previous company to test this out. On the first run, 9% of all the employees got scammed. I was pissed, but it convinced me we needed a better way to train employees for cybersecurity attacks. This is what grew into Riot.

For now we are only training for phishing, but our intention is to grow this into a tool that will continuously prepare your team for good practices (don't reuse passwords for example) and upcoming attacks (CEO fraud is next), in a smart way.

Your questions, feedback, and ideas are most welcome. Would love to hear your war stories on phishing scams, and how you train your teams!

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jedberg ◴[24 Mar 20 18:01 UTC] No.22676967[source]▶
> Would love to hear your war stories on phishing scams, and how you train your teams!

I was working on anti-phishing in 2003, before it had the name phishing. We were trying to teach our users not to fall for the scams.

It didn't work. People will fall for the same scam over and over.

The conclusion we came to was that the only solution to phishing was education, and education was also nearly impossible to get 100% coverage.

I wish you luck, but don't get discouraged if it doesn't work. We've been trying to educate people about phishing for 17+ years. :)

We shifted our focus to tracking the phishing sites and then tying that back to which user accounts were hacked, and disabling the hacked accounts and notifying the users before damage could be done.

PayPal actually holds the patent on what we built, along with a ton of other anti-phishing and phishing site tracking patents.

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BenjaminN ◴[24 Mar 20 18:17 UTC] No.22677184[source]▶
I actually started coding in 2000 trying to hack my brother, so I can relate: phishing has been a never-ending story.

It's still worth trying though!

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jedberg ◴[24 Mar 20 18:21 UTC] No.22677256[source]▶
Definitely worth trying! Just want to help you set expectations. :)
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1. johnwheeler ◴[24 Mar 20 18:52 UTC] No.22677674[source]▶
Did you try punitive disincentives?
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2. rwmurrayVT ◴[24 Mar 20 19:37 UTC] No.22678126[source]▶
The company sends out fake phishing emails. The same people keep falling for it... I suppose the outlined punishments are not strictly enforced.
3. brobinson ◴[24 Mar 20 19:55 UTC] No.22678316[source]▶
A better approach is to turn it into a game: reward those who report suspected phishing emails, security breaches, tailgating into secure areas, USB devices left around, etc. and have red teams doing this stuff periodically. Punitive measures don't really work. Friendly competition with rewards does work, though.
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4. johnwheeler ◴[24 Mar 20 22:56 UTC] No.22679960[source]▶
that's a good point :D
5. jedberg ◴[24 Mar 20 23:41 UTC] No.22680265[source]▶
In our case we were educating and protecting our customers. It's usually bad policy to carry out punitive punishment on your customers. :)

In fact, the worst offenders were actually rewarded. They were the only ones who had two factor auth for their eBay accounts. Back then we didn't have soft tokens -- the only way to do 2 factor was to get a physical RSA token, which cost about $10 at the time. So only the "best" customers were worth the cost.