The 10 Best Anti Spear Phishing Software For Employees

9 January 2024 • Cyber security

Spear phishing is one of the toughest cyber risks to combat.

Cyber criminals go to great lengths to research the organization to target and will find ways to make their phishing emails very hard to separate from the real deal.

To keep your data safe, you must invest in spear phishing software solutions that cover both the technological and human aspects of prevention. And the traditional phishing prevention methods won’t suffice.

On the technological end, you must ensure your email filters are up-to-date. But if a spear phishing email makes it through the filter — which happens to the best of us — you want your employees to be aware and trained to recognize phishing and act accordingly.

In this article, we’ll cover the best anti spear phishing software solutions on the market. Let’s dive in.

Top 10 spear phishing software solutions in 2024

Guardey
Phished.io
IRONSCALES
Trustifi
PhishTitan
SoSafe
Agari
Avanan
Barracuda Sentinel
Cofense
Microsoft Defender for Office

1. Guardey

Guardey is a spear phishing software solution that offers spear phishing prevention in two different ways:

→ Security awareness training game

→ Spear phishing simulations

Training game

Your employees get weekly cyber security challenges that take about 3 minutes to complete. This slowly but surely builds up their cyber awareness to the point where they start to recognize and report cyber risks better over time. Training weekly for short intervals instead of long-winded yearly sessions has proven to work wonders for knowledge retention.

The challenges are on topics such as spear phishing, but also other cyber risks such as weak passwords and ransomware. This ensures your employees get a good understanding on the wide range of security risks that are out there.

In a leaderboard, they can compare their scores in the training game to their colleagues. This adds a nice element of competition and boosts participation.

Spear phishing simulations

Most phishing simulation providers offer automated phishing simulations based on templates. Because of they use templates, they don’t prepare employees for true spear phishing. Spear phishing is a phishing method where criminals carefully research their targets to find information that helps them look authentic.

That’s why Guardey offers spear phishing simulations, all without templates and automation. The Guardey team sits together with the organization and collects information that helps them create an authentic spear phishing email, sends it to the right people, and reports the results.

This is a more time-consuming process than a fully automated one. That’s why Guardey advises organizations only to do a spear phishing simulation once or twice a year. It’s a quality-over-quantity approach for organizations that want their employees to truly be put to the test.

Learn more about Guardey here

2. Phished

Phished, as their name suggests, also offers phishing simulations. However, their simulations are fully automated. This makes for a very efficient process in which the security officer doesn’t need to spend a lot of time setting things up. The users get phishing tests regularly. However, since all of these simulations are not based on social engineering, they don’t prepare your colleagues for true spear phishing.

Something interesting is the fact that they use AI to drive simulations. How exactly AI can personalize phishing simulations is not clear to us yet.

Aside from simulations, Phished also offers security awareness training with micro-learning. The training material consists of quizzes, videos, and reading material.

3. IRONSCALES

IRONSCALES offers spear phishing software that tries to prevent the email from even reaching your colleagues in the first place. They combine AI and human insights to catch the phishing that goes past your Secure Email Gateways.

What’s interesting, is that you can keep track of each unique employee’s inbox for anomalies.

To get more information on their platform or pricing, you have to get in contact with sales first.

4. Trustifi

Security awareness training and phishing simulations are important. But before you need your employees to recognize phishing, you want the phishing mails to not reach them at all. Trustifi is an email security solution that helps you protect your employees from most phishing emails.

They protect your team’s inboxes with text-based analysis, files and URL scanning, and AI filters (the modern spam filter).

Their account takeover protection also alerts admins of any suspicious activities within user accounts. This enables your team to neutralize any threats before it’s too late.

To learn more about Trustifi’s tool and pricing, you can contact their sales team.

5. PhishTitan

PhishTitan is a product by TitanHQ. The company describes itself as a ‘next-generation phishing protection and remediation solution’.

But what does the product do? In short, it has a machine-learning algorithm that catches all the phishing emails in Microsoft 365 products that Microsoft can’t seem to recognize. It has a native integration with Microsoft 365, making it easy to implement.

To learn more about the tool and pricing, you can head over to their website to request a demo.

6. SoSafe

SoSafe offers security awareness training that helps your employees to recognize phishing attempts and social engineering.

The product also offers ‘smart attack simulations’ based on ‘premium industry templates’. Aside from that, you can put together spear phishing campaigns with your exact specifications. If needed, you can schedule time with an ethical hacker to help out with setting up a simulation. Whether this comes at an extra cost is not clear.

There is no free trial or pricing available on the website, so for more information, you will need to get in contact with their sales team.

7. Agari

Agari offers protection for your email environments against all forms of phishing. It comes with cloud email protection, suspicious email analysis, and a secure email gateway.

Aside from that, Agari also offers security awareness training to cover the human aspect of phishing prevention. However, this is not a native Agari product, but another product called Terranova, which is owned by the same mother company.

To see the product at work or get insights into pricing, you will need to contact Agari’s sales team.

8. Avanan

Avanan is a product that protects enterprise businesses from phishing via all your communication channels. They do so by trying to prevent the phishing emails from ever reaching your inbox in the first place.

In a neat overview, as you can see in the image above, you can see exactly where phishing, malware, or another threat has been detected. It shows the communication channel (Slack, Teams, Office365), the user, and the exact file that was possibly harmful.

Although the image says that ‘100% was blocked’, Avanan is honest about not being able to stop all phishing attempts. This is true for any software solution. Therefore, you will still need to invest in security awareness training.

Also, Avanan doesn’t present itself as spear phishing software. Spear phishing may come from a trusted source that has been hacked, without a suspicious link. Employees simply need training to spot that sort of social engineering.

For more information about their product and pricing, you can visit their website.

9. Barracuda

Barracuda is a cyber security product that focuses on threat prevention with AI. Their product integrates with Microsoft 365, trains AI models to recognize patterns in your email traffic, provides real-time analysis, and remediates threats once they have been signaled.

Again, Barracuda is a product that covers the technological side of spear phishing prevention. Since it’s not possible to weed out all spear phishing emails with such products, it is imperative to also offer human training.

10. Cofense

Cofense also offers email security for businesses. They do this by offering both training and threat detection.

The detection functionality automatically detects phishing emails. Their training library consists of a wide range of training related to phishing. This means the training doesn’t necessarily prepare your employees for any other cyber threat. You’ll need an additional training solution for that. The training solution uses a variety of animations, micro-learnings, adaptive learning, and more.

A nice feature is the Cofense threat report button, which gets integrated right into your email client. All your employee needs to do when they spot a threat is click the button, and the email is forwarded to a threat responder.

What is spear phishing software and how does it work?

Spear phishing software aims to prevent bad actors from stealing your data via phishing. Some software solutions focus on the human aspect, others on the technological aspect, or both.

The software solutions focused on the human aspect offer security awareness training and/or spear phishing simulations. With this, employees who are targeted by a spear phishing attempt are trained to recognize and report the attempt to a threat responder within the organization.

Software solutions focused on the technological aspect of spear phishing prevention often offer spear phishing email detection.

In a best-case scenario, you find two solutions that complement each other. As you need to be covered on both the technological and the human side to be as safe as possible. We can’t expect technology to block 100% of all phishing emails. And we can’t expect employees to recognize every phishing attempt. We need to invest in both.

Conclusion

There is a wide range of spear phishing software on the market. By using the list above, you can find a solution, or even a combination of solutions to make sure your organization is protected against spear phishing.

For a spear phishing software solution that offers both security awareness training and spear phishing simulations, consider using Guardey. With weekly training and periodic simulations based on true social engineering, you can turn your employees into a human firewall.

The 10 best anti spear phishing software solutions for employees