In my days as a desktop administrator, I spent countless hours training users on proper e-mail habits.
The new ClickAware tool from WatchGuard, released earlier this month for free, provides a novel way to anonymously assess the effectiveness of e-mail training. ClickAware generates a series of e-mail messages that mimic widespread worms or phish to distribute to employees via e-mail. The ClickAware e-mail messages use GIFs and HTML links rather than executable content, so the e-mail should bypass many spam filters.
If a user clicks on the attachment, instead of infecting the targets computer, the e-mail instead provides a gentle reminder of proper e-mail behavior with a warning not to open unexpected attachments. The attempt to access the attachment is also logged to WatchGuards servers, where administrators can monitor their own users statistics as well as overall “success” for all users.
However, the results logged to WatchGuard are completely anonymous, so administrators should not expect to be able to track down any scofflaws.
For more information, check out www.watchguard.com.
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