Go Phish Yourself?

A new open source toolkit is designed to provide a way for companies to educate their
employees on how to spot phishing scams, but it may give scammers a lot of help as well. The open source Simple Phishing Toolkit includes a scraper that will quickly clone any website and create a phishing lure. It also comes with tools that allow administrators to track how many employees click on the lure, what links they followed, when they did so, and even their IP addresses, browser info and operating systems.

Naturally, such tools would be very useful for IT departments and system administrators to educate employees on how to spot phishing scams. Employees falling for such scams are a leading cause of corporate data breaches, and such breaches can cost a company millions.

“The whole concept with this project started out with the discussion of, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could phish ourselves in a safe manner?’” said Will, one of the Toolkit’s co-developers. “It seems like in every organisation there is always a short list of people we know are phishable, who keep falling for the same thing every six to eight weeks, and some of this stuff is pretty lame.”

While it appears the developers had honest intentions when they created the toolkit, the fact remains it could be pretty attractive to the bad guys and they have no way of controlling that. Right now it doesn’t record any data typed into the fake phishing sites it generates, but they said future versions of the kit will have that functionality. That may make it irresistible to scammers looking for a way to create phishing campaigns that’s fast and won’t eat into any profits.

What do you think? Are these toolkits helpful or just asking for trouble?