As more organizations adopt cloud-based services, such as Microsoft Office 365, it opens up bigger opportunities for security partners to ensure that their existing and potential customers have the right security products in place. Aiming to address that need, Intel Security has released a Microsoft 365 Channel Kit that includes a new email phishing tool—the Intel Security Phishing Quiz—to help partners assess their customers’ ability to identify phishing attacks and to provide security recommendations based on the results.
“Almost every organization that I talked to has a team or at least one individual that makes sure the organization knows how to identify phishing tactics and are aware of the tools that are available to them,” said Dave Bull, director, product marketing for Web, email, and DLP at Intel Security.
“But the challenge is that a lot of those groups don’t have a big budget for education, and we started to recognize a real shortage of educational tools in the market for those organizations,” he continued.
As a result, Intel Security decided to develop a new educational tool in the form of the phishing quiz and make it available for free to its customers, and now its partner channel.
“We’ve created a kit to fully enable our channel to run this test within organizations as an educational tool, which will show them where they need more help. What they end up finding out is that everyone is quite poor at identifying phishing emails,” said Bull.
The tool gives Intel Security’s channel partners a reason to reach out to prospects and existing customers to have valuable conversations around security, said Bull.
Included in the turnkey kit is a how-to guide to help partners start the Office 365 security conversation with their prospects and/or existing customers to develop a security strategy. The kit includes the Getting Started Guide, Conversation Guide, Customer Presentation and Demand Generation Email.
The phishing quiz, which is taken by customer employees, reveals how well they can identify phishing attacks. Once the results are available, channel partners can create custom co-branded reports (with their logos), providing performance results of the phishing quiz. Performance data includes total attempts, average score, score by department and score frequency.
The assessment also reveals which sample questions were the most difficult for survey-takers, and where they had the most difficultly in detecting the legitimacy of a message, depending on the tactics used in the phishing email.
Which departments score the lowest on the quiz? Based on nearly 100,000 respondents, so far, employees with human resource and finance roles “consistently score the lowest hands-down and that always opens their eyes,” said Bull.
The results help partners identify a customer’s security vulnerabilities as well as develop a security strategy around technologies and educational reinforcement. Channel partners can make product recommendations—based on the results—for an Intel Security product or another vendor product.
Of course, Bull hopes that channel partners will recommend Intel Security. “Obviously, I’d prefer they pitch some of our email protection and Web protection technology. They can talk about these technologies and wherever that whole conversation may lead,” said Bull.
Intel Security offers several products that can help in security support for Microsoft Office 365. These include ClickProtect to identify malicious or suspicious URLs before they are opened, McAfee Data Loss Prevention to help reduce data leaks, McAfee SaaS Email encryption to prevent data from being accessible even if it has been compromised, McAfee Advance Threat Defense for Email Protection, and McAfee Gateway Anti-Malware Engine to identify viruses, worms and Trojans.
Gina Roos, a Channel Insider contributor, focuses on technology and the channel.