The fifth annual online Gone Phishing Tournament, hosted by Fortra's Terranova Security and Microsoft between October 9-27, 2023, is open for registrations.  

The tournament, which uses real-world scenarios to establish accurate phishing clickthrough rates among end users, allows organizations to benchmark their phishing resilience against true global standards. Last year, 1.2 million users from across 250 organizations took part with over 21 phishing message languages deployed. 

The Gone Phishing Tournament assesses the limits of an organization's security awareness, regardless of their size or industry. Participating organizations will receive a comprehensive report on the findings from the event, and recommendations for employees and security leaders alike - created by Fortra and Microsoft. 

The 2022 tournament, revealed several key findings:  

• Overall clicks on phishing links improved on 2021 numbers, but many end users were still prone to following through on requests for sensitive information.  
• Of those who clicked through, 44% completed action on the phishing website. 
• Only organizations with 500 or fewer employees managed to keep their click-to-form completion rate under 30%, suggesting that if an organization of 10,000 employees had been targeted with a phishing scam, 700 would have clicked the link and 300 would have compromised sensitive information. 
• The technology, finance, education, and public sectors boasted the highest number of participants. 
• Of the not-for-profit organizations who took part, almost a third (33%) reported having no security awareness training in place. 
  

"The threat landscape is complex, and it impacts every industry across the world. Recent research from Fortra revealed that phishing attacks on platforms such as Microsoft 365 have doubled since Q4 2022, so it's clear that organizations cannot afford to neglect security awareness training," said Theo Zafirakos, CISO, Fortra's Terranova Security. "In the last five years, the Gone Phishing Tournament has provided valuable resources for organizations across all industries to reshape how they approach security awareness, and this year will be no different." 

"We're proud to co-sponsor the annual online Gone Phishing Tournament. Now more than ever, it's become evident that organizations across the globe must address and prioritize integrating security awareness training into their company culture," said Sumit Malhotra, Principal Group Product Manager at Microsoft. "The tournament uses an email template from our Attack simulation training. This intelligent social engineering risk management tool is specifically designed to educate employees, assess behaviour changes, and simplify the deployment of security awareness training. We're excited to see this year's results!" 

Potential participants can register through this link until September 30.