Vade Pioneers a New Approach to Phishing Awareness Training

Vade announced that it has been awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for Automated Collection of Branded Training Data for Security Awareness Training, a new method of collecting and generating real threat samples in security awareness training.

Vade’s foray into security awareness training came in 2020 with the release of Vade Threat Coach, an automated user awareness training feature embedded into Vade’s flagship product, Vade for M365. Protected users who interact with malicious emails receive an alert from Threat Coach, sending them to a gamified user awareness quiz that gauges the user’s phishing awareness and reinforces cybersecurity best practices.

Vade developed Vade Threat Coach in response to the stunning growth in sophisticated phishing attacks. In 2021 alone, Vade blocked more than 1 billion phishing emails.

“Phishing remains the no. 1 threat to organizations,” said Adrien Gendre, Chief Technology & Product Officer at Vade and co-inventor. “What we see time and again is that, although businesses are investing millions in security awareness training, users are still clicking on phishing emails, with disastrous consequences. Users need targeted training on the phishing emails they are receiving and interacting with-not a month before and not three months after the fact. “

The automated collection of branded training data patented by Vade is a new approach to user awareness training that programmatically collects threat samples from Vade’s 1 billion protected mailboxes and generates targeted training at the user level. For example, if a user clicks on a Microsoft phishing email, their Threat Coach training will feature phishing emails and webpages that impersonate Microsoft.

“Unlike other user awareness training platforms and tools,” said Sebastien Goutal, Chief Science Officer at Vade and co-inventor, “Threat Coach trains users with genuine threat samples captured by our technologies. These are not simulated phishes created by the IT department. The training content is directly related to the threat that triggered the training. The result is a more authentic training experience.”

The programmatic collection of genuine training samples is a first in a market crowded with phishing awareness training platforms. Vade’s automated collection of branded phishing emails programmatically collects phishing samples from its technologies. Phishing samples are then anonymized and added to a Threat Coach training repository. When a user interacts with a phishing email, Threat Coach automatically generates a training session featuring branded training content. Vade for M365 admins can also send manual campaigns to their end users and choose from a list of brands to feature in the training.

“The quality of security awareness training is directly correlated with the quality of the training content,” said Goutal. “With our invention, Vade can programmatically collect and generate quality training content from the 1 billion mailboxes protected by Vade. Our data is a clear differentiator in the market that puts us at the forefront of innovation in cybersecurity.”