How Lockheed Martin Phishes Its Own

Defense contractor built an internal spearphishing simulation program amid concerns of increasing targeted attacks

Third in an occasional series on user security awareness training
On several occasions over the past couple of years, employees at Lockheed Martin have flagged suspicious emails that turned out to be previously unknown targeted attack campaigns aimed at the defense contractor.
This additional pair of eyes in security is one of the bonuses of Lockheed Martins homegrown phishing training program, according to the defense contractors corporate information security officer.
Employees each year report something to our CIRT [Computer Incident Response Team] because of our [phishing] training, and its been something new to us, and we were able to detect an intrusion that was coming at us, says Chandra McMahon, CISO at Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin launched the so-called The I Campaign in 2009, which includes monthly simulated phishing attacks on a sample of users and an integrated, interactive training system. Since then, the company has seen 45 percent fewer employees falling for the phony phishes it sends to their inboxes, and overall, 55 percent more employees are making the right decision on whether to delete a sketchy email or confidently open its attachment.
I can say definitely that not only do I have more employees taking good actions with regard to emails, but more are reporting suspicious emails to the CIRT -- and attacks have not been able to get started because employees found them first, McMahon says.
Defense contractors are one of the most popular targets of cyberespionage, and theyre regularly flooded with spearphishing emails trying to lure unsuspecting employees into clicking on a link or attachment silently harboring malware that entrenches the attackers inside the company
Spearphishing is one of the largest attack vectors to start a cyberintrusion. We recognized that many years ago, McMahon says.
[A rare inside look at how the defense contractor repelled an attack using its homegrown Cyber Kill Chain framework. See
How Lockheed Martins Kill Chain Stopped SecurID Attack
.]
Simulated phishing training, once a controversial practice, is increasingly becoming more mainstream in large corporations. Experts
say the best practice
is to inform users about the simulated phishing training program youre launching or running, why youre doing it, and how it will make them and the company safer and more secure.
Lockheed Martin created its spearphishing training program and first tested all employees in 2010 to establish a baseline for user behavior. Its a cultural thing for the company, too. We firmly believe this is a business conduct issue: We call it conduct on the keyboard, she says. If you keep the doors locked and dont allow [outsiders] to go unescorted into our facilities ... you can do the same thing in cyber.
The goal, like with many security awareness programs for users, is to commission users to be part of the overall security architecture in an organization. When we think of cyberdefense at Lockheed Martin, we talk from a defense-in-depth perspective. We look at our employees as being the first line of defense: Thats why we have made an investment in education and awareness, McMahon says. If a user doesnt click on a spearphish, it helps us stop a cyberintrusion from getting started.
Lockheeds simulated phishing messages are customized for various groups or individuals in the company as well.
Even so, some sophisticated attacks can be so convincing that even users well-schooled in phishing behavior and signs will still be fooled. McMahon says thats the reality of todays threats, and if a user does fall for a real phish, the companys own security architecture would take over from there and provide the defenses, she says. If you have bad actors sending email as legitimate email users with legitimate context ... in that situation, users may not be able to make the right decision to not open an attachment or link, she says.
Thats where you have to rely on your custom defense capabilities to detect and thwart any malware, McMahon says.
When a user mistakenly falls for a simulated phishing email, they are automatically routed to an interactive training session that illustrates for them the red flags to look out for, and teaches them how to handle the messages. If they receive an email with a low level of trustworthiness or an irrelevant context, for example, its likely a spearphish or scam.
We have repeated testing ... theres a progressive set of actions that take place if employees dont perform well on tests, McMahon says. If we test a user and they take a bad action, the system then engages them and does real-time training ... they then get put back in the pool to be retested.
Phishing awareness programs have proved to be effective for many organizations. PhishMe, which providers a service, says one of its customers had about 58 to 65 percent of its users fall for the phony phish the first time, but a year later, that rate was in the single digits.
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