Those who enjoy making lives miserable gain lots of fun and enjoyment out of sending malicious emails to a company filled with innocent employees. Often, it’s hard to determine which emails are harmful and which are legit just by looking at a subject line or sender name. This task becomes even more difficult when a person looks at hundreds of emails per day and must find those that are beneficial and discard those that are harmful.

A relatively new program called PhishGuru aims to bring email security to a whole new level. PhishGuru is a type of learning tool that was developed to help company employees spot a harmful email a mile away. While this tool does have its definite advantages, there are some noticeable disadvantages as well, starting with the setup process.

Setting Up PhishGuru Is Difficult

The PhishGuru setup process takes some time and energy to complete. In order to successfully setup the program, you must first contact the IT help team over at PhishGuru. Then, you will probably have to contact your own IT person just to make sure things are working smoothly. Although the PhishGuru interface is simple enough, you’ll have to mess around with various specifications and settings before you can let this program loose.

In order to send out trap emails to various people, users must “Create a Campaign,” which takes just a few minutes. Each campaign can contain a number of useful user details such as the names and emails of each person and even the department that a person works in. All of these details are recorded and kept for later review (this way, you can easily find out if someone in your business is letting in all those dangerous emails).

PhishGuru Effectiveness

Just how effective is PhishGuru? Well, the program does actually work very well when in use. Here’s how it works: PhishGuru sends out emails to a number of people who have been added to a mailing list. If a person opens an attachment or clicks on a malicious link, a pop up will appear scolding that person and explaining why an email was dangerous and shouldn’t have been opened (each portion of the email that is a trap will be clearly defined). Through trial and error, employees learn to skip those emails that will bring an entire network down.

In theory, PhishGuru makes a lot of sense – based on the age-old conditioning method, which does actually work. The only problem this reviewer sees with PhishGuru is that some employees might get used to the idea that opening up a malicious email is ok because PhishGuru isn’t real. Of course, this could cause a lot of problems for any company large or small. If you are going to use PhishGuru, make sure – and make double sure – that all employees know when the phishing test has ended, or you might wind up with some unwanted surprises. Otherwise, PhishGuru performs well, is effective in every aspect, and will prove to be a wise investment and excellent way to prevent a network shutdown. Right now, PhishGuru retails for around $10 per license (per employee).