Phishing Security

Phishing Engagement

A Phishing Engagement will craft targeted, realistic tests to evaluate and strengthen your team's resilience to social engineering attacks.

What you'll get:
  • Specialized Phishing campaign crafted to target your individual business operations
  • Optional Spear Phishing, Vishing, and SMS based campaigns
  • Engagement statistics including the amount of views, clicks, and credentials compromised
  • A comprehensive report with detailed findings and remediations steps

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What is a Phishing Engagement?

A phishing engagement is a controlled, simulated phishing campaign designed to evaluate how well your employees can identify and respond to social engineering attacks. DarkPoint Security crafts realistic phishing scenarios — including deceptive emails, fraudulent login pages, and targeted pretexts — that mirror the tactics used by real-world threat actors targeting Canadian organizations. The goal is to measure your organization's human attack surface without putting actual data or systems at risk.

During a phishing simulation, employees receive carefully crafted messages that replicate common attack patterns such as credential harvesting, malicious attachments, and business email compromise. Every interaction is tracked and measured, providing your organization with detailed metrics on who opened the email, who clicked a link, who submitted credentials, and who reported the message to your security team.

Phishing testing is one of the most effective ways to assess and strengthen your organization's security awareness posture. By identifying employees and departments that are most susceptible to social engineering, you can focus training efforts where they matter most and establish baseline metrics to track improvement over time.

Phishing engagement

Why Your Organization Needs Phishing Testing

Phishing remains the primary initial access vector in the majority of data breaches. Technical controls alone cannot fully protect your organization when attackers target your people directly.

  • The Human Element is the Weakest Link — Over 90% of successful cyberattacks begin with a phishing email. Even organizations with strong technical defenses are vulnerable if employees cannot recognize and report social engineering attempts
  • Compliance Requirements — Regulatory frameworks including PCI DSS, SOC 2, OSFI, PIPEDA, and ISO 27001 require organizations to conduct regular security awareness assessments and demonstrate that employees are trained to handle phishing threats
  • Measure Security Awareness Training Effectiveness — Phishing simulations provide quantifiable data on whether your security awareness training program is actually changing employee behaviour and reducing click rates over time
  • Establish Baseline Metrics for Improvement — Without phishing testing, you have no objective measure of your organization's susceptibility. Baseline campaigns establish a starting point so you can track progress, justify security investments, and demonstrate improvement to leadership

Our Phishing Methodology

DarkPoint Security's phishing engagements follow a structured methodology grounded in industry-recognized frameworks to ensure realistic, measurable, and repeatable campaigns:

  • NIST SP 800-50 & SP 800-16 — Guides our approach to security awareness testing, training program assessment, and measuring employee security competency
  • PTES Social Engineering Framework — Structures our engagement lifecycle from pretext development and target reconnaissance through campaign execution and reporting

Each engagement begins with reconnaissance and pretext development, where we research your organization's industry, communication patterns, and publicly available information to craft believable scenarios. We then configure campaign infrastructure including sending domains, landing pages, and tracking mechanisms that closely mimic legitimate services. During campaign execution, phishing messages are delivered in controlled waves to measure employee response under realistic conditions. Finally, we compile comprehensive reporting with per-department breakdowns, trend analysis, and actionable recommendations for strengthening your security awareness program.

Campaign Types

Our phishing engagements cover a wide range of social engineering attack vectors to provide comprehensive testing of your organization's resilience:

  • Email phishing campaigns
  • Spear phishing (targeted individuals)
  • Vishing (phone-based social engineering)
  • Smishing (SMS-based phishing)
  • Business email compromise simulation
  • Credential harvesting campaigns
  • Malicious attachment simulation
  • QR code phishing (quishing)
  • Landing page cloning
  • Multi-stage phishing campaigns
  • Executive targeting (whaling)
  • New employee targeting

Industries We Serve

DarkPoint Security delivers phishing simulation campaigns to organizations across Canada's most targeted sectors. We tailor every campaign to reflect the real-world threats facing your industry. We serve financial services and banking (wire transfer fraud simulations, PCI DSS and OSFI compliance requirements), healthcare (patient data protection, PIPEDA and provincial health information act compliance), technology and SaaS companies (developer-targeted attacks, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 security awareness requirements), and government and public sector organizations (nation-state threat emulation, security clearance awareness). Our phishing scenarios are designed using threat intelligence specific to each sector.

Why Choose DarkPoint Security

  • Realistic Campaigns That Mirror Real Threats — Our phishing simulations replicate the exact tactics, techniques, and pretexts used by threat actors actively targeting Canadian organizations, not generic template-based tests
  • Custom Scenarios Tailored to Your Organization — Every campaign is built around your industry, internal communication style, and business processes to maximize realism and provide meaningful results
  • Detailed Metrics and Executive Reporting — We deliver granular analytics including open rates, click rates, credential submission rates, reporting rates, and per-department breakdowns with trend analysis across campaigns
  • Certified Security Team — Our consultants hold OSCP, CEH, and CISSP certifications with hands-on experience in social engineering, red teaming, and offensive security operations
  • Canadian-Based Security Firm — As a Toronto-based company, all campaign data, employee information, and reports remain within Canadian jurisdiction, addressing data sovereignty and privacy requirements

Frequently Asked Questions

No. Our phishing simulations are designed to be indistinguishable from real attacks so that results accurately reflect employee behaviour under genuine conditions. Only designated stakeholders within your organization are informed of the campaign. After the engagement concludes, we offer the option of conducting targeted awareness training for employees who interacted with the simulated phishing messages, turning the exercise into both an assessment and a learning opportunity.

We track a comprehensive set of metrics throughout every campaign including email open rates, link click rates, credential submission rates, attachment download rates, phishing report rates (employees who flagged the email to IT or security), and time to report. All metrics are broken down by department, role, and campaign wave so you can identify specific areas of risk and measure improvement over time.

A typical phishing engagement takes 2 to 4 weeks from start to finish. This includes an initial planning and pretext development phase, campaign infrastructure setup, one or more waves of phishing delivery, a monitoring period to collect employee responses, and final reporting with analysis. More complex engagements involving multiple campaign types (email, vishing, smishing) or larger organizations may require additional time.

Yes. Every phishing engagement is fully customized to your organization and industry. We research the specific threats targeting your sector, study your internal communication patterns, and develop pretexts that are relevant to your employees' daily workflows. For example, a financial services firm might receive simulated wire transfer approval requests, while a healthcare organization might see fake patient record access notifications. This level of customization ensures realistic results and actionable findings.

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