Phishing Simulation for Your Own Team the Ethical Training Programme Step by Step
A phishing simulation sends your own staff a harmless fake phishing email so they can practise spotting the real thing before a criminal tests them first. Done properly, it is training. Done carelessly, it is a trap that destroys trust in IT. This guide runs the whole programme the ethical way, in the right order.
✍️ Technical Anshu🎣 Security Awareness⏱️ One programme, repeated every quarter
🎥 Watch the full video - the phishing simulation setup shown step by step
The video walks through the platform side - building the campaign and sending it. This page is the programme that must exist around the tool, because the tool is the easy part. Five rules decide whether a simulation makes your office safer or simply makes your staff angry and secretive. They cost nothing, they are listed in full below, and every later page in this series hangs on them.
Campaign summary - an ethical simulation at a glance (illustrative)
✔ Audience: your own staff only, inside your own organisation
✔ Approval: written sign-off from management and HR before launch
✔ Landing page: teaches the lesson, records only the click
✘ Real passwords collected: none - this is a hard rule, not a setting
✔ Results: shared as team totals - never as a name-and-shame list
Read the five lines top to bottom. If any one of them is missing from a planned campaign, the campaign is not ready to send.
1
What a phishing simulation really is
It is a practice drill, the same idea as a fire drill. Your IT team sends a fake phishing email to your own staff - a shared-document notice, a mailbox warning, a delivery message - with a link that leads not to a criminal but to a safe page owned by you. The platform records who clicked and who used the report button, and the person who clicked lands on a short lesson instead of a stolen password. Nothing real is harvested, nothing real is at risk, and the skill being built - pause, check, report - is exactly the skill that stops the real attacks your gateway cannot catch.
2
The five rules that keep it ethical
Written approval first. Management and HR sign off before anything is built. You are sending deceptive email inside your own company - without documented backing, a well-meant test looks like an attack or a prank.
The landing page teaches. The click opens a calm lesson page that shows what gave the email away - not an error screen and not a scolding.
Never collect real passwords. The page must not ask for, transmit or store actual credentials. This is a hard design rule, covered in its own page in this series.
Report totals, not names. Leadership sees percentages per team at most. Individual names stay with the programme owner, for private coaching only.
Coach, never punish. Clicking leads to a short lesson and a friendly conversation - never discipline. Punishment teaches staff to hide mistakes, including real ones.
3
Choose a platform honestly
Two honest families exist. Open-source platforms - the GoPhish class - are free and self-hosted: you build the email templates, landing pages and sending profiles yourself and run the console on your own server. The cost is your time, and the gain is full control. Commercial awareness platforms charge per user and add ready-made template libraries, built-in training modules and polished reporting dashboards. Either family can run an ethical programme and either can be abused by a careless operator - the ethics live in the five rules above, not in the software. Pick by your team's size and the time you can honestly give it.
4
Build the campaign in a fixed order
Audience group - one department or the whole office, never a list that includes people who were never briefed.
Email template - believable, everyday, and fair: a careful reader must be able to spot at least one clear warning sign.
Landing page - the teaching page, built and checked before anything is sent.
Sending profile - sent from a training domain your organisation owns, never from your real company domain.
Launch window - a normal working period, agreed in the approval. Test the full path on IT mailboxes first.
5
Run it, then teach while it is fresh
The simulation itself is the middle of the programme, not the end. Within days, everyone receives the short follow-up: clickers get the five-minute module on the checks that email tested, reporters get thanked, and the whole team sees the totals - clicked rate down or up, reported rate, and what the next round will practise. Repeat quarterly with fresh scenarios. One simulation proves almost nothing; a trend across quarters is the real result, and it is the number worth showing management.
🔴 The password rule is absolute. A landing page that asks staff to type their real password and stores it has stopped being training and become credential harvesting - plus a highly sensitive database you now have to protect. Ethical simulations record the click and teach. Full stop.
🎥 Watch the Complete Video
See the platform setup, the campaign build and the sending profile created live, step by step.
Is it acceptable to run a phishing simulation on our own staff?
Yes - with written management approval, HR involvement and a genuine training purpose, internal simulations are a standard and widely accepted part of security awareness. The approval, the teaching landing page and the no-punishment rule are what separate a programme from a prank.
Should the landing page ask staff to enter their real password to prove the lesson?
Never. The page records that it was reached and then teaches. Collecting real credentials creates a real credential database and a real breach risk, and it teaches nothing that the click itself did not already prove.
How often should a small office run simulations?
Quarterly is the common pattern - frequent enough to build the reporting habit, spaced enough that you measure a trend instead of noise. Announce the programme and the quarter; never announce the exact day.
This guide is based on the phishing simulation video by Technical Anshu • Stuck on a step? Ask in the video comments - you will get an answer there 🙏