Phishing impact testing
What's the true impact on your organisation when an employee is phished?
Phishing is the most common type of cyberattack, with over 1.35 million unique phishing sites detected worldwide — and it remains the primary initial-access vector in Australian ransomware incidents, which is exactly why the Essential Eight pairs user training with multi-factor authentication. It is time to go a step further than security training and simulated phishing tests, so everyone in the organisation understands the proven impact — not just the theoretical possibility — of falling victim to a phishing scam. Captured credentials are handled in an ephemeral test environment and never persisted as plaintext, so you understand what assets are most vulnerable — and can evaluate the systemic changes that reduce your risk — without creating new exposure.
Integrate with your phishing campaign app
The NodeZero Phishing Impact test is designed to supplement your simulated phishing tools, such as KnowBe4, Proofpoint, and in-house efforts. Simply copy the NodeZero script into your phishing landing page. Then the credentials of the users who responded to the lure will appear in the supporting NodeZero internal pentest you've created to run for the duration of the campaign.
Reveal critical impacts from phished credentials
Once you have set up your Phishing Impact test to interoperate with your phishing simulation, NodeZero automatically captures the credentials of the simulated phishing attack victims and uses them to pentest your internal network. You can use the report from this test to assess the business risk of a successful phishing attack, and identify security controls that can be put in place to mitigate this risk. As users are phished, their credentials are entered into NodeZero — and by default the phishing script tells the user their login was incorrect, prompting a second submission, so NodeZero captures both attempts and harvests more than one credential per victim where it can.
Ephemeral by design
Captured credentials flow into an ephemeral environment dedicated to that single pentest and destroyed once the pentest completes. Sensitive parts of credentials (plaintext passwords, hashes, private keys) are never stored in persistent databases — an assurance that matters for DISP-obligated and Privacy Act / Notifiable Data Breaches-aware buyers before a single credential is captured.
What could an attacker do with this phished credential?
Once a phished credential is added to the test, NodeZero uses it to probe your environment just as an attacker would. The resulting test helps you understand how each phished credential can impact your environment, including the data and domain privileges it can obtain. Your organisation's risk varies with the blast radius of the phished credential. In this attack path, a phished domain user credential leads to domain compromise.
Beyond simulation: proven impacts
NodeZero shows you the proofs of the weaknesses it exploited and their associated impacts. When NodeZero shows you how it was able to achieve domain compromise with a phished credential, you've moved beyond simulation, to demonstrated proof.
Test your access policies, test your responses
This NodeZero capability helps users understand the potential gravity of being phished, and helps security teams assess their defences. Learning that a phished intern could lead to domain compromise can inspire security teams to tighten their least privilege controls. You benefit from a concise summary of your organisation's phishing exposure for each credential, prioritisation of the impacts, and detailed guidance about how to fix them.
Prioritise and identify systemic issues
As a result of a Phishing Impact test, your organisation will be able to easily understand which weaknesses need to be addressed. NodeZero prioritises your organisation's weaknesses and groups systemic issues so that you can address them holistically.
Understand the blast radius of every phished credential
Data access
What type of data can the phisher access? Is it protected data? Crown jewels?
Admin access
Can the phisher gain admin access to hosts in your network?
Cloud pivoting
Can the phisher move laterally to cloud environments?
Privilege escalation
Can the phisher elevate privileges and compromise other credentials?
We used the test with a small group of people we call our 'clickers', and three users gave us valid creds. Long story short, we love this new test and plan to incorporate it into our phishing program going forward.
It has the granularity that allows us to incorporate it into our regularly scheduled tests.
NodeZero's new Phishing Impact capabilities let you see the potential damage of a phishing attack before it happens.
We love that it uses phished credentials for an authenticated test to see what different users can access.
We appreciate how NodeZero manages the visibility and security of the compromised passwords.
It's great how it ties into KnowBe4 really easily.
The new phishing impacts can help leadership understand the actual real-world impact of successful social engineering attacks.
See the real impact of phishing in your environment
Integrate NodeZero with your phishing simulation tools and get proof of what an attacker could do with phished credentials.